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The Moral Conflict of Humanity 



AND OTHER PAPERS 



BY 



V 



A. C. KENDRICK, D. D., LL. D. 




U2' 



PHILADELPHIA 

AMERICAN BAPTIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY 
1420 Chestnut Street 

1894 



^ 




Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1894, by the 

AMERICAN BAPTIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY, 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C. 



LC Control Number 




tmp96 027334 




CONTENTS. 



i. 

The Moral Conflict of Humanity, .... 7 

II. 

Renovation of Physical Nature at the Resurrec- 
tion, 47 

III. 

The Parousia and its Attendant Events, . . 63 

IV. 

The Exalted Name, . 80 

V. 

The Millennium of the Apocalypse 84 

VI. 

The Rendering of "tpash," ]05 

VII. 

The Self-evidencing Character of the Bible, . 109 

VIII. 

John the Baptist's Message to Christ, . .125 

3 



4 CONTENTS. 

IX. 

Jesus and the Jewish Temple, 135 

X. 

Three Parables, 145 

XI. 
The Father of Lies, 170 

XII. 

The Heathen and the Light of Nature, . .176 

XIII. 
Sin and Death in Adam and the Race, . . .182 

XIV. 

Accursed From Christ, . . . . . . . .211 

XV. 

Baptism for the Dead, ...... 220 

XVI. 

Preaching to the Spirits in Prison, « , . 253 



PUBLISHERS' NOTE. 



The papers comprising this volume, with one or two 
exceptions, have been previously published in various 
periodicals. Their superior merit caused those becoming 
acquainted with them to wish for their rescue from their more 
or less precarious existence, and their embodiment in a perma- 
nent form worthy of them and of their distinguished author. 
After the rewriting of some, and the careful revision of all, 
they were furnished for this volume. 

Few of our eminent educators have the opportunity for 
publication which their positions and influence would war- 
rant. Their duties are too exacting. Routine work is too 
despotic, and the class room absorbs what the larger public 
might enjoy. It affords the publishers especial pleasure that 
in the present instance they carry to that wider circle some 
fruitage of the life of one as conscientious in the service of 
his students as he was helpful to them. 

Dr. Kendrick does not need and would deprecate any 
praise from us. It is but simple justice however to say, 
that his command of English is equal to his knowledge of 
Greek, and that allied to both, is a poetic Christian imagi- 

5 



6 publishers' note. 

nation not often excelled. These qualities all appear in these 
papers, and will cause them to receive a warm welcome from 
those to whom for years the name of Dr. Kendrick. has been 
almost a household word. 

As might be expected from a man of Dr. Kendrick' s 
scholarship he has assumed an independent position as to the 
truths expounded. It so happens that because of this, in 
the exegesis of some disputed passages he stands directly 
opposed to the commonly received interpretation, and at 
some points in disagreement with the views of many in 
the denomination to which he belongs. In these he ex- 
presses his own thought, and the publishers are not in 
every instance to be regarded as agreeing therewith. The 
sincere, earnest purpose of the truth-loving Christian student 
is manifest on every page, and the characteristic just in- 
dicated will enhance rather than diminish the value of his 
work. Thought will be stimulated where assent may be 
denied. It is felt that the book is at once a deserved tribute 
to a Christian scholar, and an important contribution to the 
body of Christian thought. 



THE MORAL CONFLICT OF HUMANITY. 



THE MORAL CONFLICT OF HUMANITY. 

(6 yap vofios nveufiaTUOt;, iym dk eapxtvoq.') 
Romans 7 : 7-25. 

THERE is, in the deepest import of the term, but one single 
conflict of which our earth is the theatre ; a conflict out 
of which all others spring, and into which they all may be 
resolved. It is the struggle between moral good and evil, 
between right and wrong, between holiness and sin. It is this 
which imparts to every collision of political or social elements, 
to every form of outward or inward warfare, whatever of 
vitality and significance it possesses. If it does not contain 
the element of right and wrong, if it does not rest at bottom 
on some moral antagonism, it is scarcely worth the paper and 
ink consumed in making its record. There is no irreconcila- 
ble and internecine hostility ; no irrepressible and intermina- 
ble conflict; no war which admits absolutely no terms of 
adjustment, except the war between opposing moral elements 
as they are more dimly discriminated by man's natural reason, 
and as brought out into broader and sterner antagonism on 
the luminous page of revelation. 

This conflict is partially outward. It bodies itself forth in 
the great social and political forces which affect human pro- 

7 



8 THE MORAL CONFLICT OF HUMANITY. 

gress. It is the latent power in all the great movements 
which convulse and upheave society. Yet these are but sec- 
ondary and symptomatic. They are but occasional excursions 
of the contending parties from that which is their proper 
theatre and battle-ground — the human soul. The powers 
properly and primarily arrayed in the strife are the senti- 
ments and affections, the principles and passions of the indi- 
vidual man. Here, in the secret chamber of a single soul, 
hidden away from the light of the sun, rages a conflict deeper 
in its origin, mightier in its elements, broader in its compass, 
and more momentous ,in its issues than any outward war that 
convulses thrones and shakes continents. In the terrible strife 
there going on, myriads of spirits hasten to marshal them- 
selves as combatants and allies ; the clang of its unearthly 
weapons rings through all the realm of the Invisible; its 
vicissitudes are watched by millions of eager gazers in the 
high places of the creation ; and its issues involve the weal or 
woe of a being molded in the image of God and born to the 
high heritage of his eternity. This contest is the substance 
of which all others are but shadows. This is the one grand 
central struggle of which all others are but border skirmishes, 
and by which, sooner or later, they all will infallibly be 
determined. How goes the battle in the human heart? Tell 
us that, and we will spare you the trouble of forecasting the 
issues of the outward struggles of society. They are prede- 
termined. The results of all minor controversies are wrapped 
up in that of the one all-comprehending contest. When the 
citadel has fallen, it is hopeless to defend the outposts. When 
the heart has withered, any external bloom must be transi- 
tory. When the fountain is cut off, the streams must cease to 
flow. And so the currents of social improvement must neces- 



THE CONFLICT DELINEATED. 9 

sarily dry up unless fed from vital and perennial springs of 
virtue in the individual soul. 

A conflict such and so momentous is actually going on in 
every human bosom ; it has been the inevitable allotment of 
humanity from the hour of the apostasy. And, what is un- 
utterably sad, it is a conflict in which, apart from the special 
provisions of redemption, the better cause is invariably the 
loser. Wherever this universal battle has been fought, under 
whatever diversity of outward circumstance, whether amid 
the dense darkness of uncultured heathenism, amid the mock- 
ing lights of refinement and philosophy, or under the broad, 
clear, steady illumination of God's revealed law, however 
varied in form and intensity, everywhere and always the 
heart that has not been the subject of a divine renewal and 
had its weakness re-enforced by Almighty strength, has suc- 
cumbed beneath the terrible might of the forces of evil. One 
long succession of defeats, utter and ignominious, fills out the 
monotonous and dreary record of the strife of unaided human- 
ity with its gigantic moral foe. It has struggled : God has 
never allowed a human being to walk the earth so degraded 
but that some ray of moral light flashed across the darkness 
of his soul, and some faint sentiment of virtue resisted the in- 
rushing powers of evil. But the struggle was predestined to 
failure. Speculatively, metaphysically, the human will may 
be as free as the most ardent champions of free volition 
assert ; but religiously, spiritually, it is the victim of a bond- 
age of which Egyptian or African servitude is but the faintest 
symbol. 

This great conflict in its fiercest phases, and in its inevitable 
and melancholy defeat is, we believe, delineated by the Apos- 
tle Paul in the latter part of the seventh chapter of his Epistle 



10 THE MOUAL CONFLICT OF HUMANITY. 

to the Romans. The natural antagonism between the lower 
and higher elements in man, between the flesh and the reason, 
the depraved passions and the conscience — an antagonism 
heightened and intensified by the presence and powerful action 
of God's revealed law — is here drawn out in few but dark and 
decisive lines, such as he only could have employed who 
knew by experience all the horrors of the conflict. We say 
such we believe to be the nature of the delineation ; for, as our 
readers well know, the passage has been the subject of two 
very diverse interpretations, the one ordinarily regarded as the 
Calvinistic, the other as the Pelagian. The former refers it 
to the so-called Christian warfare, to the struggle between 
gracious and depraved affections in the renewed man; the 
latter to the strife in the natural man between the heart and 
the reason under the stimulating influence of God's revealed 
law. The latter view prevailed among the Christian fathers 
until the time of Augustine. They understood the passage 
nearly unanimously of the conflict which takes place in the 
unregenerate soul under the convicting influences of the law. 
For dogmatic reasons, Augustine, in his controversy with 
Pelagius, took a different view, and referred it to the strife of 
contending elements in the converted soul. Otherwise, some 
of its expressions seemed hardly consistent with his doctrine 
of the complete original depravity of fallen man. His inter- 
pretation was followed by the leading expositors of the Refor- 
mation. Calvin, Melancthon, Beza, each so explained it. 
And, in fact, since the time of Augustine, the two opposite 
interpretations have been deemed the indexes of two diamet- 
rically opposite theological systems. To deny that the passage 
describes the " Christian warfare " has been considered almost 
tantamount to a denial of that warfare itself, or at all events 



DEIFT OF KECEXT INTERPRETATION. 11 

as marking a strong tendency to the lower and looser tenets 
of Pelagius. The other view has been deemed almost indis- 
solubly associated with the profounder theology of Augustine 
and Calvin. We believe the time to be not distant when 
such a judgment will be a matter of astonishment ; when it 
will be seen that the passage, as interpreted by most of the 
Fathers, instead of deserving the brand of the odium theologi- 
cum, as the natural ally of heresy, is in fact one of the most 
thoroughly Calvinistic passages in the whole New Testament, 
and asserts with extraordinary fullness and decision that bond- 
age of the human will, that complete vitiation and enthrall- 
ment of our nature, which is the decisive point of Calvinism. 
The drift of recent interpretation is setting toward the 
earlier view. Bengel, Kiickert, Meyer, DeWette, Olshausen, 
among the late New Testament expositors, have returned to 
the views of Chrysostom and Theodoret. Umbreit and 
Delitzsch still indeed adhere to the Augustinian interpreta- 
tion ; while some, as Hoffman, Tholuck, Ewald, compromising 
the two views, regard the apostle as speaking indeed of his 
present condition, but of that condition as independent of its 
Christian elements, making thus a logical and ideal, but not 
temporal distinction. This latter view has unquestionably a 
measure of truth. In just so far as the conflict in the renewed 
is the same as that in the unrenewed man ; in just so far as 
the elements of the moral struggle belong to every stage of 
yet unsanctified humanity we may admit the correctness of 
this middle and compromising view. But, after all, this 
takes it out from the category of the properly so-called Chris- 
tian warfare. For it is seen at a glance that a class of exer- 
cises which is common to regenerate and unregenerate, is not 
applicable, distinctively, to either. And the real stress of the 



12 , THE MORAL CONFLICT OF HUMANITY. 

controversy is, whether any of the moral movements described 
in this passage are properly and peculiarly Christian. If 
they are, then Augustine is right, and we have the Christian 
warfare. If they are not, then the opposite view is right, and 
we have primarily and properly a war among the natural ele- 
ments of the soul, even though that war be carried forward 
into our regenerated state. The proper question, therefore, 
is whether the passage delineates the strife between the natural 
and the spiritual elements in the regenerated soul, or that con- 
flict between the flesh and the moral reason — between our de- 
praved lusts and consciences re-enforced by the sanctions, 
more or less dimly seen, of the divine law, which is the in- 
evitable allotment of our apostate, but recoverable nature. 
We render our own unqualified adhesion to the latter view. 

That we may come intelligently to the subject, we glance 
rapidly over the preceding discussion. The earlier chapters 
of the Epistle have shown the necessity of salvation by grace, 
in consequence of the universal enthrallment of mankind by 
sin, and their utter inability, therefore, to keep the law. And 
as the provisions of the gospel are necessary, so in chapter fifth 
they are shown to be abundant. The remedy is fully ade- 
quate to the disease. The streams which flow from the fount- 
ains of redemption are deeper, fuller, mightier than those 
which well up from the dark fountains of the apostasy. The 
ruin wrought by the first Adam, only paves the way for the 
grander deliverance achieved by the Second, and the very 
ravages and desolations of sin are made to render honor to super- 
abounding grace. But this suggests the objection which was 
early urged against the gospel : Is it licentious in its tendency ? 
If sin is overruled to the glory of abounding grace, shall we 
continue in sin, that grace may abound ? And this leads to 



VINDICATION OF THE LAW. 13 

the second great feature of the gospel, its spiritual efficacy. 
It not only justifies, but sanctifies; not only delivers from the 
penalty of sin, but breaks its internal yoke and power. Its 
very nature, its fundamental conception, is death to sin and 
life to holiness. The believer has been freed from bondage, to 
a law which, as he could not keep it, had power only to enslave 
and to curse, and been brought into a spiritual state in which 
he can fulfill essentially the righteousness of the law. So far 
then, from the gospel being the minister of sin, it alone brings 
the moral freedom and power through which holy action be- 
comes possible. " For when we were in the flesh," says the 
apostle, "the motions of sins — the sinful passions — which 
were through the law, wrought in our members to produce 
fruit unto death." 

But as the apostle had before to vindicate the gospel, he 
has now to vindicate the law. As he had repelled the infer- 
ence that, because the gospel makes grace to superabound in 
the very midst of sin, therefore we should continue in sin 
that grace may abound, so now he repels the inference that, 
because the law has been forced into an unwilling instrumen- 
tality in producing sinful passions, therefore the law is itself 
sinful. This is the point which he now proceeds briefly, but 
earnestly to discuss, viz., the relative agency of sin and the 
law in effecting the moral ruin of man ; that, on the one hand, 
he may fully vindicate the character of the law, and yet, on 
the other, show its impotence to wrestle with the gigan- 
tic forces of evil in the human bosom. In doing this, he 
naturally partially personifies sin as well as the law, and this 
partial, undesigned personification, especially of sin, is kept 
up mainly through the subsequent description. Sin appears as 
the primary and malignant agent, the Law as the subordinate 
B 



14 THE MORAL CONFLICT OF HUMANITY. 

and enforced accomplice, while the " J" is the person on whom 
these forces operate, not the apostle, except so far as the apos- 
tle, having gone through the bitter experience, may make 
himself the representative of all who have shared the like 
struggle. And it is no part of Paul's purpose to exonerate 
the individual by throwing the guilt over upon an abstraction 
called sin. This is not at all in his mind. He is dealing 
with entirely another matter. He is adjusting the mutual 
relations of sin and the law, and then depicting the complete 
and hopeless bondage to which they reduce their victims. 
Everything else, with his characteristic absorption in the 
topic in hand, is for the time being lost sight of. 

In repelling then, the charge that the law, though acci- 
dentally concerned in working human depravity, is itself sin- 
ful, the apostle declares at the outset that it is in fact the very 
antipodes of sin. " Nay, I did not know sin, except through 
law ; for I knew unlawful desire only as the law said, thou 
shalt not covet." The very fact of the law's revealing sin, of 
its bringing it to light in its true nature as sin, shows that it 
can have no affinity with sin. We learn sweet by contrast 
with bitter, and bitter by contrast with sweet. The light that 
reveals darkness, must itself be the opposite of darkness. The 
rule which shows the crookedness of an object, cannot itself 
be crooked. And so the law, against whose solemn back- 
ground of spiritual requirement sin discloses its nature and 
enormity, can be no natural parent and ally of sin. Rather 
it is sin's innocent instrument ; " for," proceeds the apostle, 
" sin taking occasion through the commandment, wrought in 
me all unlawful desire " ; a manifest explanatory expansion 
of the above terse and emphatic language, " the sinful 
passions which were through the law." We have here the 



SIN DEAD WITHOUT LAW. 15 

rationale of the matter. It was not through the primary 
agency of the law ; it was only as the law was made by Sin 
the instrument of his malignant and destructive purpose. Sin 
took advantage of the presence of the law to accomplish that 
which he otherwise could not do ; " for without law, sin is 
dead " — not was dead, but a universal truth, a broad and 
general statement of the relation of sin to law. Where there 
is no law, there is no transgression. Sin is not reckoned 
when there is no law. The strength of sin is the law. The 
law is its vitality, its stronghold, the very right hand of its 
power ; that of which sin availed itself to come into exist- 
ence, and under whose shelter and sanction it sways its iron 
tyranny over the soul. Such is, in brief, Paul's conception 
of the purpose and action of the law. Its office is to reveal 
sin, to stir up and bring to light the evil elements of our na- 
ture ; nay, actually to create sin by rendering that sinful 
which would not be so except as the violation of some 
positive enactment. Holy action, then, under the law, was 
impossible, and was even rendered by the law more utterly 
and absolutely impossible. The law worketh wrath. It has, 
in the apostle's conception, no reforming power or purpose. 
It is our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ ; not by corrective 
and elevating discipline ; not by lifting us to a higher plane 
of moral virtue, from which we could easily step off upon the 
still loftier platform of the gospel ; but by probing to the 
very bottom ; nay, by aggravating ; nay, by almost creating 
our spiritual disease. " It was added on account of trans- 
gressions," to give them their direst and most desperate char- 
acter, and by giving full scope to the ravages of sin, to show 
us the awful nature of the monster, and to drive, not draw us 
to the gospel. 



16 THE MORAL CONFLICT OF HUMANITY. 

And, as without law sin is dead, so by consequence, I, the 
man, was alive once without law. When sin was dead, had 
as yet no real existence, I, in whom through the law it came 
afterward to live and reign, was alive. Death had not then 
been wrought in me by that sin which is the parent of death. 

I was really in a state of innocence, and consequently of 
life. Sin, which kills, and therefore, death, its child, had as 
yet no dominion over me. The meaning of the passage is 
too plain to allow mistake. It is the direct inference from 
the preceding. I was alive, not merely in my own imagina- 
tion, but in the real fact of the case. As there was yet no 
law which sin could lay hold of to work in me guilt and 
death, I must be innocent and morally living. But when the 
commandment came, sin came to life, and I died. Sin, work- 
ing through the commandment, became a living power in my 
soul and plunged me into guilt and moral death. And so 
" the commandment which was ordained for life, was found to 
me unto death." For sin taking occasion through the com- 
mandment deceived, beguiled, seduced me, as the Serpent did 
Eve through the command regarding the tree of knowledge, 
and slew me, made me the victim of death, as in the case of 
our first parents. The fault lies not then with the law. It is 
holy, just, and good. It lies with sin, which wrought death 
in me through that which is good, that it might be shown to 
be sin, might disclose the hellish malignity of its nature ; 
might in fine, through the commandment become " exceeding 
sinful." 

We have thus reached the threshold of the disputed pas- 
sage, and if our interpretation thus far is correct, it will go 
far to determine our understanding of what follows. We 
have been tracing the respective agencies of sin and law in 



FACT ENDORSING INTERPRETATION. 17 

compassing the moral ruin in man, in dragging him down 
from a state of innocence and life into a state of depravity 
and death. The delineation is not, as understood by many, 
that of a salutary awakening from the sleep of death to in- 
cipient spiritual life, but rather of the subjection of the 
soul to corruption and death.. The whole drift of the passage 
is in this direction. It is introduced to indicate the agency of 
the law in working those sinful passions which, when we were 
in the flesh, produced fruit unto death. What more natural 
than that in doing this the writer should go back and trace 
the respective agencies of the two powers in originating the 
sinful state ? And how apt an illustration was furnished in 
that law of Eden, which seized upon by sin as an occasion of 
transgression, became the innocent source of all our guilt and 
woe! And the process is that of sin working death in us 
through that which is good, and one whose responsibility is 
sedulously charged upon sin. Had it been a process of moral 
conviction, of awaking from death instead of plunging into 
death, why strip the law of that which would really have been 
its honor? And why commit the monstrous absurdity of 
making the hellish monster, Sin, turn around and become the 
leader in the work of moral renovation ? If Satan cast out 
Satan, how can his kingdom stand ? 

Nor need we have difficulty with the interpretation on the 
score of fact. It is an ideal description of the process of man's 
spiritual enslavement and ruin. The allusion is clearly to 
the scenes enacted in paradise. The prohibition against 
eating of the tree of knowledge gave opportunity for unlawful 
desire, which Sin malignantly laid hold of. Previously our 
first parents lived, enjoyed innocence and complete exemption 
from death. But taking advantage of the command, Sin 



18 THE MOKAL CONFLICT OF HUMANITY. 

wrought in them all unlawful desire ; deceived and killed 
them. The imagery thus drawn from the fall is ideally trans- 
ferred to the whole agency of sin and the law in effecting 
man's spiritual ruin. It matters not whether the actual con- 
dition has been completely realized in an individual case or 
not ; whether Paul shadows forth a period in his own moral 
history, as infancy or childhood, in which as yet the law had 
not come to him, or any condition of humanity, in which the 
law being dimly revealed, a less flagrant criminality is a sort of 
comparative innocence. He is illustrating a principle — a prin- 
ciple which was fully exemplified in Eden, and is everywhere 
exemplified just in proportion as the law remains in actual 
abeyance, and God winks " at the times of this ignorance.'* 
Originally sin, through the commandment, plunged the pa- 
rents of the race from perfect innocence into guilt and death, 
and the process is repeated in kind wherever the law coming 
to individuals or communities that had lived in previous 
ignorance of it, deepens their responsibility and aggravates 
their condemnation. We need not for a moment suppose that 
Paul intends to represent the apostasy of our first parents as 
actually and fully repeated in any of their descendants ; or 
that he regards any human being since the fall as ever really 
in a state of innocence and life. But the principle is equally 
exemplified in the absolute apostasy of the first transgressors, 
and the comparative deterioration which sin works through 
the law in any of their offspring. Nay, it might even be ap- 
plied to the process of legal conviction, so far as the law then 
comes with greater power to the soul, and as the clear percep- 
tion of the state of moral death is momentarily confounded 
with its actual existence. It is no violent metaphor to regard 
that which awakens me personally and consciously to my 



A PEISON-HOUSE WAIL. 19 

state of perdition as identical with that which really plunges 
me into it. Still that illusion could be but transient, and 
that illusion cannot be the basis of the present representation. 
The death is too real, and the purpose is too manifest to shift 
its responsibility over from the law upon sin. 

Having gone back thus a step to depict the origin of the 
state, having shown how sin and law combined to plunge the 
soul from life and innocence into misery and death — "sin 
working death by that which is good" — he reverts to the 
consequences of that plunge ; and the abiding state of the 
soul, enthralled under the joint sway of the tyrant, and his un- 
willing but potent ally is the theme, if we mistake not, of the 
portraiture which follows. We have first the sudden plunge ; 
we have now the permanent degradation. We are called to 
follow the awful struggle of a soul that has not forgotten its 
high origin and destination ; that has " not lost all its original 
brightness " ; that still retains a spark of the divine fire which 
was lighted in the inner sanctuary of its being, in its terrible 
bondage to the forces of sin and death guaranteed in their 
usurpation by the strange alliance of the law. 

The first wail from the prison-house gives the keynote to all 
that follows. It tells us at once how complete is the enthrall- 
ment, how hopeless will be the struggle. Its terrible import 
ought never to have been mistaken. In three brief clauses 
the apostle unfolds the whole secret of his ideal condition. 
Passing, in the excitement of discourse, from the past to the 
present, or rather throwing himself back into the past, and 
giving to his picture dramatic fervidness, he exclaims : " For 
we know that the Law is spiritual, but I am carnal, having 
been sold under sin." Here is the secret of the law's enslav- 
ing power over me ; the reason why sin can use it in riveting 



20 THE MORAL CONFLICT OF HUMANITY. 

my chains. It is spiritual and demands, as a condition of 
obedience, a spiritual nature. But that nature I do not 
possess. I am carnal; not merely fleshly (<rapxu6q) but 
made of fleshy (aapxwoq) the expression being entirely equiv- 
alent to "being in the flesh" (as if made of flesh) of 
ver. 5, and marking a state wholly incompatible with spir- 
itual action. Let the reader look at the above verse, for 
it contains the germ of the whole subsequent description ; and 
let him look, in confirmation, at verses 8, 11, and 13. But 
more, I am " sold under sin," enthralled by a tyrant who, as 
shown by all the context, rules despotically in my flesh, and 
thence extends his sway over my entire being. The phrase 
marks, by universal admission, in this passage the condition 
of a slave. Hence, the description goes on, as a slave " that 
which I work I know not." The slave knoweth not what his 
master doeth, and as he but works out blindly the behests of 
his master, so he knows but partially the nature and compass 
of his own actions. Acting against his higher nature, driven 
by the wild impulses of passion, rather than guided by the 
steady light of reason, he acts blindly, at random, in the dark. 
We take yiv6ffxa> with Chrysostom and Theodoret, Riickert, 
Meyer, Alford, and others, in its simpler sense of know, rather 
than in that of allow, approve. The difference, however, does 
not affect the general scope of the interpretation. 

And in thus working ignorantly and blindly at the imperi- 
ous and arbitrary bidding of another, " I practise not what I 
would, but what I hate that I do." I perform at the behests 
of my tyrant, loathsome deeds, from which my better nature 
recoils. " The man who acts in the light of his moral con- 
sciousness," says Meyer, " does of course not what is abhorrent 
to his moral reason, but acts in conformity with its dictates. 



A VOTE OF APPROVAL. 21 

He who acts without this clear moral consciousness performs 
not that which his enlightened reason wills, but that which it 
repudiates and abhors." Is not then the declaration true in 
a most important sense of unregenerate man ? Does he not 
often violently, and always really, always at least until sealed 
over to perdition, resist the passions that enslave and debase 
him ? Does he not, in the profounder elements of his soul, 
loathe the lusts to which he yet feels himself a helpless prey ? 
Is there not between the higher and the lower forces of his 
nature a war as ruthless as the grave? Is not the literature 
of the world, is not the experience of humanity written all 
over with the proofs of the rebellion of subject-reason against 
the tyrant lust ? We need not fill our pages with classical cita- 
tions to illustrate this point. The whole daily experience of 
mankind but reiterates the sentiment of the Latin poet : 

Aliudque cupido, 
Mens aliudsuadet; video meliora proboque 
Deteriora sequor. 

And of the English poet : * 

Weak and irresolute is man; 

The purpose of to-day, 
Woven with pains into his plan, 

To-morrow rends away. 

The bow well bent and smart the spring, 

Vice seems already slain ; 
But passion rudely snaps the string, 

And it revives again. 

" And if I do that which I would not, I assent unto the law 
that it is good." The dissent of my moral reason from my 
acts is an approval of that law which joins my reason in con- 

1 Cowper, " Human Frailty." 



22 THE MORAL CONFLICT OF HUMANITY. 

demning them. I thus, in the very act of rebellion, not 
merely concede, but give my vote of approval to the law 
which condemns me. The apostle keeps in mind his purpose 
of vindicating the law for its enforced agency in enslaving 
the victim ; the victim himself pronounces its decisive ac- 
quittal. And thus, as the case stands (yovt), acting against 
my better reason, working that which I would not and which 
I know not, I show that I am completely in a state of bond- 
age; that I am tyrannized over by a power from without 
that has absorbed, as it were, my whole being ; that " it 
is no longer I that do it, but Sin that dwelleth in me." 
Sin has usurped the throne of my being ; he compels me to 
act blindly, darkly, in violation of reason and conscience, 
and of that moral law to which they lend their sanction. 
Thus, we have again, if possible, with deeper emphasis, the 
"sold under sin" of verse 14, in neither case, be it re- 
membered, to exonerate the sinner from responsibility; but 
here, as throughout, to exhibit the completeness of his bond- 
age under the law, and the " exceeding sinfulness " of sin. 

" For I know that there dwelleth not in me, that is, in my 
flesh, any good"; suggested by the preceding "sin that 
dwelleth in me," and confirming the statement there incident- 
ally made that sin, and- not anything good, dwells in that 
"flesh" which is my controlling element. I am predomi- 
nantly "in the flesh," am fleshly (vapxivoq), and in this now 
controlling element of my being dwells no good. The an- 
tithesis to the flesh, my moral will, my reason (voug), has 
indeed an element of good, but it is powerless against the 
overmastering influence of the flesh, which causes every good 
resolution to perisli in the bud. " For to will is present with 
me, but how to perform what is good, I find not." I have the 



THE CLIMAX APPROACHED. 23 

power of resolving, of willing, of purposing, but that is all. 
My resolutions die in their cradle ; they are strangled in their 
very birth by the serpent that has coiled himself around my 
moral being. And again, in proof he adds : " For the good 
w 7 hich I would I do not, but the evil which I would not that 
I do " ; my moral being is so completely disorganized that 
its laws are totally reversed. And on this follows an em- 
phatic reiteration of the inference that so acting and so re- 
belling, I prove myself the bond-slave of sin ; my acts are 
not so much my own as of the tyrant that dictates and com- 
pels them. It is not necessary to restrict the " I " here to 
my internal nature, my better self. It is simply a strong rhe- 
torical figure, asserting the supreme dominion of sin over the 
the whole man. 

The struggle approaches its climax. I have tried the 
strength of the several parties enlisted in it. Sin, flesh, law, 
reason, conscience, will, each has put forth its power, and I 
have reached my conclusion : " I find then the law, the fixed 
and inexorable fact, that when I would do good, evil is present 
with me." It matters not how earnest and energetic my 
striving ; what clearness of moral perception, what loftiness 
of moral purpose, what persistent and desperate endeavor, 
backed up by the sanctions of the law, come to my rescue. 
All is in vain. My purpose withers away, and I sink in exhaus- 
tion and despair. " I have pleasure, indeed, in the law as to 
the inward man " ; my reason and conscience recognize its 
majesty, its purity, its transcendent excellence, and render it 
their admiring homage. But alas for the tyranny of lust ! 
" I see another law in my members (my flesh) warring against 
the law of my mind, and rendering me captive to the law of 
sin which is in my members." This is but the summing up of 



24 THE MORAL CONFLICT OF HUMANITY. 

all that precedes — the final decision as to the strength of the 
bondage, and the hopelessness of the struggle. My mind, 
reason (youq), approves the law which lust renders me impo- 
tent to obey. Well may such a state of things wring from 
the wretched bondman the despairing cry, " Miserable man 
that I am ! Who shall deliver me from the body of this 
death ? " Who shall ransom me from this triple slavery of sin, 
flesh, and death? 

We are now prepared for the apostle's remedy. We have 
reached a point which demands the interposition of a divine 
Deliverer. If ever there was a dignus vindice nodus, if ever a 
crisis which might justly call a deity to the rescue, it is here. 
In that sharp cry went up the concentrated wail of our apos- 
tate humanity — the shriek of a storm-tossed, wrecked, and 
despairing soul. And where is the remedy? Where the 
light that shall shine on this deeper than Egyptian darkness? 
Where the star that shall arise on this stormy ocean, and 
guide into the port of peace a foundering bark freighted with 
the riches of immortality? The Deliverer is not wanting. 
From a high spiritual eminence, the apostle has surveyed 
these terrible convulsions of an enthralled soul. He has not 
delineated this scene of gloom and degradation simply to 
mock us. He has not made his severe and searching diag- 
nosis of our disease without knowing that the physician was 
at hand. He has not uncovered our moral nakedness, except 
to reclothe us in vestments of heavenly beauty. He knew 
from the first whither he was tending. His own soul had 
gone through the agony. His own lips had drunk to its 
dregs the bitter cup. His own feet had trod this dark valley 
and shadow of death, and he knew how glorious a light shines 
on the realm beyond. He opens to us the abyss of our 



THE NEW BACKGEOTOD. 25 

wretchedness, that he may point us to a corresponding height 
of bliss. He portrays the abjectness of our slavery, that he 
may set over against it the dignity of our spiritual freedom. 

" I thank God " — such is the outburst of his apostolic heart 
as he hangs shudderingly over that gulf of perdition — " I 
thank God, through Jesus Christ our Lord ! " This name 
suggests the whole. Atonement, justification, redemption, 
freedom, moral power and purity, spiritual life culminatiug 
in life eternal, are all wrapped up in that one all-potent name. 
It is the talismanic word which transform a scene, black with 
the pall of death, into a scene radiant with heavenly glory ; 
which bids the slave start into freedom, the sick into health, 
the dead into life. We stop not to inquire into the structure 
of the elliptical sentence. Whether Paul renders his thanks 
to God through Jesus Christ — that there is a Deliverer ; or, 
whether, as we rather believe, he thanks God that deliverance 
comes through Jesus Christ, matters not as to the essential 
import of the passage. It is the end of that terrible strife ; 
the soul's emerging from that tempestuous sea into a haven 
of divine peace and calm. 

But having thus briefly and rapturously indicated the 
remedy, the apostle, before proceeding forward on that swell- 
ing flood of triumph, which heaves like a magnificent ocean 
through the entire next chapter, reverts for one moment to 
the previous picture, as, however, against the new background 
supplied by the last sentence. Before, he was alone in his 
struggle ; now he has found a potent ally. Before, it was " I, 
of or by myself," (avrd<; lyw) by a usage of pleonasm, very 
familiar in Greek. " So then," — he casts his eye back for a 
moment — " I, of myself, serve with the mind indeed the law 
of God, but with the flesh the law of sin " ; leaving the reader 
C 



26 THE MOPwAL CONFLICT OF HUMANITY. 

to draw the contrast, of which, in fact, the whole next chapter 
is an expansion, that now no longer left to himself, the 
dominion of the flesh broken, he serves with mind and spirit 
the law of God. 

We have gone rapidly over the passage, and can scarcely 
be left in doubt as to the nature of the struggle which it 
delineates. That it is not a Christian who is thus terribly 
and hopelessly enslaved, is shown first by the origin and 
starting point of the discussion. It originates in a purpose to 
vindicate the incidental complicity of the law with sin, in mak- 
ing it produce fruit unto death in the depraved soul ; and in 
doing so, it shows first how sin took occasion from the law to 
plunge the person into a state of death, and then how the two 
concur, the one directly, the other indirectly, to hold him 
there. 

And as the starting point, so the whole tone and tenor of 
the portraiture determine it to the unregenerate. The per- 
son is predominately, ideally, theoretically, in the flesh. He is 
the bond-slave of sin that enthralls his will to his fleshly 
appetites, makes him powerless to execute the law, and com- 
pels him, after treading and retreading the ever-recurring 
circle of renewed and baffled endeavor, of momentary victory 
and permanent defeat, to sink at last in exhaustion and despair. 
Such assuredly is not Paul's ideal of the Christian character, 
such is not its practical exemplification in the world. The 
Christian is not the purchased slave of sin ; he is not so in the 
flesh as to be unable to accomplish tbe spiritual requirements 
of the law. He does, though imperfectly, yet really perform 
them. He does not consume all his energies in task work 
which his better nature loathes. He is not so the thrall of 
sin that sin, eDgrossing his personality, becomes as it were the 



27 

responsible author of his acts — " No more I that do it, but sin 
that dwelleth in me." Dogmatic ingenuity has indeed tor- 
tured the very fact which marks the extreme of degradation 
into a proof of Christian character. The fact that he is in 
bondage, that his will is enthralled, argues, it is urged, that it 
is not the sinner ; for to him sin is the natural state, and he 
has no other will. But is it true that there are no conflicting 
elements in the natural man ? Are not reason and conscience 
inextinguishable advocates for the right, and protestants 
against wrong, in the human soul ? Is it not, therefore, the 
precise description of unrenewed humanity that it is a subject 
at once of moral struggle and moral servitude ; that the nobler 
elements which God, as a gracious token, has left living within 
it, bear decisive though ineffectual testimony against the pas- 
sions and appetites by which they are enthralled ? Is not the 
higher nature in reluctant vassalage to the lower? These 
quenchless aspirations after the only good and fair, these 
longings for a higher life, these life-long endeavors to build 
up over the treacherous quicksands of passion a durable struc- 
ture of virtuous character, these remonstrances of the reason, 
these stings of conscience, these agonies of remorse, these 
resolutions and repentings, these " resolves and re-resolves," 
which lie strewn along every step of the pathway to perdition 
— what are they but eloquent witnesses to the veracity of the 
apostle ? What do they speak of but a perpetual revolt against 
a perpetually overmastering despotism ? 

But, on the other hand, is this the ideal — or the actual — 
condition of the believer ? He may, indeed, as he renounces 
his spiritual prerogatives, as he is unfaithful to the law of his 
heavenly birth, partially pass again under the yoke of sin ; 
but he never becomes again its helpless thrall. He may not 



28 THE MOKAL CONFLICT OF HUMANITY. 

be, and he is not, with his utmost fidelity, able immediately to 
extinguish his fleshly lusts ; but he is on the whole gradually 
subjugating them, and advancing toward their complete extir- 
pation. In the agonies of the passing conflict, and under the 
pressure of remaining corruption he may often adopt the lan- 
guage of utter spiritual impotence. He may speak of his 
thralldom to sin as of a will without any power for good ; 
but the declaration is only partially and relatively true. His 
normal condition is precisely the reverse. As a Christian, he 
is free. As a Christian, he is spiritual. As a Christian, 
walking not after the flesh, but after the spirit, he does fulfill 
essentially the righteousness of the law. True, he bears into 
every act the contamination of sin ; but it is no less true that 
he bears into every act an element of holiness. If he never 
does a deed which does not partially violate the law, he neither, 
if he is a genuine child of the Spirit, ever does a deed which 
does not partially, in its deepest significance, fulfill it. 
And to apply to him who is thus emancipated the terms which 
express the extreme of moral degradation, is simply monstrous. 
Who is more wretched than the slave of sin ? What condi- 
tion more abject and deplorable than that of the helpless bond- 
man who, blindly and perforce, works the will of the tyrant 
who is urging him on to destruction ? Such is the state of 
him whom the apostle here personates. Moral servitude is his 
ideal condition. It is not the intermittent but the continuous 
state ; not the transient seeming, but the permanent reality. 
As a slave, he knows not what he works, and prosecutes task 
work which he hates. As a slave, he has no independent, at 
least no effective volition, but has his very personality absorbed 
into that of his indwelling tyrant. As a slave, though he is 
alive to the excellence of the divine law, and would fain obey 



HYPERBOLE INADMISSIBLE. 29 

it, vet another law overmasters him, and renders obedience 
utterly impossible. And finally, as a slave, he raises the ago- 
nizing cry for deliverance. To the practical side of the picture 
there is no relieving light, no softening shade. The condition 
is absolute. There is not the slightest evidence that the writer 
speaks only comparatively, and is putting in strong hyperbol- 
ical terms the subjective feeling of inability to come up to the 
measure o? the mind's aspirations. The whole tenor of the 
representation absolutely forbids this idea. It is one dead 
level, one dreary desert of moral inability. Over and over 
again is presented the one single feature of the soul's absolute 
incapacity to break the yoke of sin, and perform — not merely 
in degree, but in kind — the requirements of the law. It is 
impossible to avoid the conclusion that the distinctive, the 
differentiating element of the condition here described is that 
of one whose moral faculties recoguize fully the excellence 
of the law, but whose enslavement to flesh and sin deprives 
him of the power to obey it. 

In this respect then, how far from decisive is the fact that 
the believer, in the vicissitudes of his Christian warfare, often 
finds these expressions applicable to his own experience. That 
may be very appropriate as a passionate hyperbole which is 
very far from true as an objective description. The Christian 
is still, though not in the sense in which the apostle often uses 
the expression, in the flesh. Sin, though vanquished, has not 
been exterminated. The gospel does not at once consummate 
its redeeming work, but leaves him still to many a bitter 
struggle, and sometimes to succumb for a moment to his 
powerful foe. Hence in the varying phases of his Christian 
life, the expressions of the present passage often force them- 
selves from his lips. To his present seeming they are not in- 



30 THE MORAL CONFLICT OF HUMANITY. 

applicable. Looking at what lie should be and what he is — 
at his ideal and his actual self — at the heights of transcendent 
purity which he is yet so far, far below — he often feels that to 
will is present with him, but that performance is impossible, 
and he often sighs despairingly over the bondage of the flesh. 
But after all, his state is removed as wide as the poles asunder 
from the one here described. That is relative, this is abso- 
lute ; that is exceptional, this is normal ; that expresses the 
transient phases of Christian feeling ; this the sad and final 
verdict of the moral consciousness. The one struggler is really 
spiritual with contaminations of the flesh ; really free, but with 
dark reminders of his slavery ; really going on in a career of 
moral conquest, and " through the shadows of the globe sweep- 
ing into the younger day." The other, really in the flesh, 
really in bondage, alternates only between desperate struggle 
and inevitable defeat. 

We see, then, how widely the passage differs from others 
which are sometimes appealed to as proof that the picture 
here drawn is applicable to the Christian. In 1 Cor. 3, the 
apostle tells his Corinthian brethren that he could not speak 
unto them as spiritual, but as carnal, as babes in Christ. 
" And ye are yet carnal. For whereas there is jealousy and 
strife among you, are ye not carnal, and walk as men ? " The 
state here represented is exceptional and partial, the result 
partly of spiritual infancy, partly of a voluntary descent from 
high Christian ground into the turbid atmosphere of human 
passion. Christians are nowhere treated as mere spiritual 
machines, bat as moral agents, capable of relapsing, partially 
at least, from their spiritual standing and yielding to the 
seductions of the flesh. Forgetting his heavenly birthright 
and his spiritual freedom, the believer may partially re-en- 



A SEEMIXG PARALLEL DESTROYED. 31 

thrall himself to the sins from which he has been emanci- 
pated. In his folly he may, and often does, "gather the links 
of the broken chain," and seek to twine them anew around 
him. But this state of partial carnality into which one may 
fall, is far removed from the state of complete and controlling 
carnality out of which one cannot rise. The theory of the 
Christian life is its possession of spiritual power ; the theory 
of the condition we are here contemplating is its utter destitu- 
tion of spiritual power. 

But Gal. 5 : 16-19, is cited as parallel to the present pas- 
sage in relation to believers. An exact rendering and a 
moment's examination, destroy the seeming parallel : " And 
I say, walk in the Spirit, and do not fulfill the desire of the 
flesh. For the flesh desireth against the Spirit and the Spirit 
desireth against the flesh; and these are contrary to one 
another in order that ye may not do the things which ye 
would." The persons here addressed are in the Spirit, and as 
being spiritual are exhorted to walk in the Spirit ; of such 
spiritual condition or walk, the passage now under consider- 
ation contains no trace. We there have the antagonism of 
the flesh and the Spirit — their hostile striving, each in order 
to prevent the person from doing the things which he other- 
wise would ; the flesh seeking to prevent him from following 
the impulses of the Spirit ; the Spirit from following the im- 
pulses of the flesh. But of any inability on the part of the 
believer to perform spiritual works the passage contains not 
the slightest intimation. 

But let us advert again to some other features of our pas- 
sage, which have been supposed to make for its application 
to the Christian. The use of the first person and the present 
tense has been often urged in proof that Paul was describing 



32 THE MOEAL CONFLICT OF HUMANITY. 

Lis present spiritual conflicts. The use of the present, how- 
ever, in delineating a past scene is one of the commonest 
figures in rhetoric, and springs out of one of the most natural 
laws of the human mind. And also the individualizing of a 
general and abstract statement and bringing it home to one's 
self in a concrete form, is frequent with vivid thinkers and 
writers, and is eminently suited to the fervid genius of Paul. 
His spirit is all aglow with the truths which he is exhibiting, 
and with his whole impassioned nature he plunges into the 
scene which he is delineating, and makes it a present reality. 
Special reasons, moreover, can be seen in the present case for 
this vivid dramatic impersonation. Paul was no stranger to 
the conflict which he so vividly portrays. He had sounded 
all the deep abysses of that terrible experience. Even in the 
proudest days of his phariseeism, while exulting in the strict- 
ness of his legal morality, and in an outward righteousness in 
which men could detect no flaw — even then, the lightning 
flashes of Sinai must have often sent startling illuminations 
into the chambers of his soul. In the inmost centre of 
consciousness he had felt strange convictions that his morality 
was rotten, and his righteousness a sham. He had felt that 
the spiritual requirements of that law rose heaven-high above 
his utmost reach of moral effort, and he had often shrunk 
back from the future with a dreadful presentiment that the 
end of all was to be ignominious defeat. And thus, in his 
own personal experience, Paul is recording the universal ex- 
perience of humanity. He is delineating one of the phases 
of the universal conflict in that which has transpired in his 
own soul. His own experience is but the vivid embodiment 
of the warfare which humanity is always waging, and to which, 
though under very altered conditions and with the certainty 



THE APOSTLE REPRESENTATIVE. 33 

of a reversed result, even the Christian bosom is not a 
stranger. Nay, the actual conflict is often severest in the 
Christian, for it is precisely in him that the sleep of death 
has been broken, and the Spirit has undertaken the work of 
overthrowing the dominion of the flesh. Still the warfare 
here waged is not the warfare of the Christian as such, not a 
warfare which is ever in all its elements exemplified in- him ; 
for the Christian is never wholly without spiritual power. 
And the fact that the apostle is delineating his own former 
pungent experience, and in this standing as the representative 
of struggling humanity, abundantly accounts for the outward 
form of his representation. 

Again, the expression, " It is no more I that do it, but sin 
that dwelleth in me," has been urged as proving that not an 
un regenerate, but a renewed man is speaking. It is readily 
admitted that the language might be so employed ; it might 
be used by one conscious that all his nobler energies were de- 
voted to God and holiness, to indicate that those sinful acts 
which he performs are so alien to his regenerated nature that 
they seem to belong to another personality. It might thus be 
used to indicate a predominant reign of holiness. But such is 
not its use here, but rather the opposite. For here it refers 
not to his exceptional acts, but to the whole forces of his prac- 
tical nature as against his rational and volitional, as being 
overmastered and controlled by sin. The obvious intention 
of the language here is to represent a state of complete moral 
slavery. 

But it is urged that the expression (yuv\ dk ouxirt), no more, 
no longer, (" it is no more I that do it," ) indicates a transi- 
tion into an altered state. Even Bengel and Olshausen, who 
take the passage in general as describing an unregenerate 



34 THE MORAL CONFLICT OF HUMANITY. 

condition, find here an advance toward a better frame of 
mind. 

To this we must reply that the person's situation nowhere ap- 
pears darker and more hopeless than in verses 21, 23, 24. In 
truth the w T ord auxin is, as is held here by Kiickert, Meyer, 
and De Wette, not temporal, but logical. It refers not to 
a present time as contrasted with a former time, but to 
an actual, in contrast with a supposed ideal state. This 
usage has hundreds of illustrations in classical, and several in 
New Testament Greek, answering to the logical uses of vov, 
vu>(, now, as the case stands. Both usages are abundant in 
Greek, though not sufficiently noticed by the lexicons. In 
verses 17 and 21 then, of this passage before us, " If I do 
what I would not, it is no longer I that do it," means "as 
the case actually stands, it is not I that do it, as under other 
circumstances it would be." The language indicates no pro- 
gress toward a better condition. It does not say that it is 
no longer I that do, as it once was, but it is not I that do it, 
as under another supposition it would have been. 

But we are pointed to the expression : " I delight in the 
law of God after the inward man," as unanswerable evidence 
that the apostle is describing the Christian warfare; and 
doubtless it furnishes strong seeming support to this view. 
And were this the real language of the apostle, we should 
feel that only the most decisive evidence of the context could 
prevent our referring it to the Christian, and could hardly 
account for it, even by supposing that the apostle had thrown 
back unconsciously, his regenerated emotions into his ante- 
Christian state, and tinged the conflict under the law with the 
coloring of the Christian warfare. But in fact the apostle 
says no such thing. He does not talk about delighting in the 



DECISIVE TERMS. 35 

law of God ; the word which he employs has no such vivid- 
ness and glow of meaning. It is simply ((Tuvrjdoriat) to be 
pleased with, to have pleasure in, and does little more than 
take the act out of the sphere of mere intellectual or moral 
approval. It is less strong, not only than rip-a/iac, delight my- 
self, or aydXXoixai, exult, but even than z<iipw f rejoice. It is a 
somewhat heightened expression of the consent to, give my 
sanction to, of verse 16, and in both cases the apostle uses de- 
cisive terms, partly because he wishes to emphasize the mind's 
vindication of the law, and partly because the stronger the 
testimony of the moral reason to the excellency of virtue, the 
more odious and formidable appears the enslaving power of 
sin. A similar principle explains the I hate used of the sen- 
timent with which he regards the course in which his sin-en- 
thralled appetites impel him. So repugnant is that course to 
his moral reason, so thoroughly do all the nobler convictions 
and impulses of his nature pronounce its condemnation, that 
it is with no very violent metaphor that he declares that he 
hates it. There are convictions of the speculative intellect, 
warm and hearty approvals of the conscience, and glowing 
imaginative sentiments, which border so closely on the radi- 
cal affections of the soul, that they are with difficulty dis- 
criminated from it. Virtue lives and glows as a conviction 
in the intellect and as a sentiment in the imagination, when 
it really has no power over the heart ; and he will often dilate 
admiringly, and even rapturously, on truth, beauty, and 
goodness, over whose life they have not a particle of practical 
power, and dwell with loathing and disgust on the very vices 
that enslave him. And Paul, it should be remembered, deals 
freely with the actual phenomena of the human consciousness. 
His fervid and glowing pen pours out the emotions of an ex- 



36 THE MORAL CONFLICT OF HUMANITY. 

cited soul without stopping to weigh nicely the metaphysical 
accuracy, or the possible dogmatical misapprehension of his 
expression. And he here uses the strong and decisive terms 
of hate and approval, partly because he feels them, and 
partly because he would render his profoundest homage to 
the law, and make sin appear exceedingly sinful. 

But is not the " inward man " a distinctive characteristic 
of the Christian, and does not this phrase mark a believer's 
struggle? We answer that there is nothing in the phrase 
which should, in advance, limit it to the regenerate. On the 
other hand, as the person is in the flesh, carnal, with a resist- 
ing will and moral sense, nothing is more natural than that 
over against this outward man, the flesh, he should designate 
this reason and conscience as the inward man. That this is 
what the apostle here refers to, is evident not only from the 
general drift of the context, but from his immediate explana- 
tion. " The inner man " is his (vou?) ; his mind, intelligence, 
reason, not anything that is characteristically Christian. In 
the Christian we have the " new man," the " new creation," 
the "spiritual man," as his peculiar attributes, and although 
this mind (youq) may be applied to him (as in 2 Cor. 4.) as the 
seat of his spiritual being, it need, by no means, be necessarily 
thus restricted ; and here clearly it is not. The Spirit of God 
dwelling within the Christian has regenerated and made him 
spiritual. This is his appropriate description. His proper 
warfare is a war of the flesh against the Spirit. Here the 
warfare is of the flesh against the reason. The law of the 
mind is in unequal conflict with the law of sin. There is no 
trace of that spiritual being which the New Testament every- 
where ascribes to the Christian ; no trace of a heavenly birth, 
of a divine renewal. The person has never been lifted into a 



AN IN ACCURATE RENDERING. 37 

higher than his native element, never been furnished with 
supernatural weapons, never endowed with aught higher than 
his natural sentiments of right and duty, for carrying on the 
conflict. Hence the heaven-wide difference between the two 
conflicts. The one is that of the flesh and the Spirit, in 
which the Spirit is systematically and steadily triumphant. 
The other is that of the flesh and the moral reason, in which 
the reason is permanently and hopelessly enthralled. 

Again, the closing declaration of the passage is deemed to 
demand the Christian interpretation. It runs in our version : 
" So, then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but 
with the flesh the law of sin." The rendering is somewhat 
unfortunate. More accurately it is : " So, then, I myself, or 
I, of myself, serve with the mind, indeed, the law of God, 
but with the flesh the law of sin." As thus translated the 
passage is a mere resumption, though from a now altered point 
of view, of the whole preceding description, and yields, when 
carefully examined, no support to the Augustinian interpreta- 
tion. First, the I, by or of myself (as before remarked, a very 
familiar use of aurdq in Greek), naturally marks the condition 
of the combatant before the accession of the new and divine 
helper whom the last sentence brings to his aid. Secondly, 
in accordance with this, it is, as before, only with his mind, 
his understanding, his reason, that he as yet serves the law of 
God, not with the Spirit, as afterward, when he enters upon 
his spiritual state. Thirdly, we ask the particular attention of 
the Greek student to the particles and the order of the clauses. 
With [i£v and di the second clause is regularly the higher and 
decisive one ; the former merely conceding a point, but leav- 
ing the stress of the statement to fall upon the latter, as in 
English, " He is learned indeed, but foolish " ; " he is rich, to 

D 



38 THE MORAL CONFLICT OF HUMANITY. 

be sure, but miserable." And thus the introductory clause 
(with fiiv) may often be properly expressed in English by 
while or although. In the present case then, the exact force 
of the passage is, " So, then, I, by myself, serve with the mind, 
it is true, the law of God, but (as the countervailing and deci- 
sive fact) with my flesh the law of sin " ; or, " So, then, I, of 
myself, although with the mind I serve the law of God, yet 
with the flesh serve the law of sin." Thus by the structure 
of the sentence, the decisive idea, that on which the mind is 
left to rest as determining the person's moral condition is, that 
he is, after all aapxtvoq, and serves with his flesh the law of 
sin. The darker aspect of the case is the final and controll- 
ing one. The serving of the law of God with the reason, is 
good as far as it goes, yet it cannot avail to break or annul 
the tyranny of the flesh. Had it described a Christian, the 
order of the clauses would have demanded to be reversed : 
So, then, I with my flesh, it is true, serve the law of sin, but 
with the mind or the spirit the law of God. As it is, it is only 
one more repetition before the writer bids good-bye to that 
state forever — of the so-often repeated thought of the unequal 
strife — impar congressus Achilli — of his aspiring reason with 
the over-mastering and enchaining flesh. 

If it is further objected to our wide application of the pas- 
sage, that Paul speaks so definitely of the law of God as that 
which claims his approval, and not virtue, right, moral excel- 
lence, we must remember that Paul was a Jew, belonging to a 
nation that had received an express and immediate revelation 
from God, and one whose conceptions of virtue and vice, 
moral good and evil, wisdom and folly, clustered around and 
centered in the revealed word of God. They were left to no 
vague imaginations of beauty, truth, and goodness. The 



39 

whole world of spiritual ideas, came to them in a form terribly 
concrete. All that the pagan world contemplated of the true, 
the beautiful, and the good, was to the Jew summed in that 
law of God which Infinite Holiness had flashed into his face 
and conscience from the awful summits of Sinai. This law 
the Jew obeyed, when he did good. This law he approved, 
when he approved the right. In this were summed up all his 
conceptions of the moral government of the world, and the 
moral obligations of the race. As, therefore, the whole system 
of redemption comes to us clothed in Jewish costume, and we 
have to expand its local Jewish symbols into world-wide prin- 
ciples, so the great conflict of humanity here takes the pecu- 
liar type of Judaism — in fact its highest type — and the battle 
which in a Gentile, who was a law to himself, would have 
been with the law of right and duty as traced on the tablet 
of his conscience, becomes here a direct issue with the outward 
revealed ordinances of a holy God. 

And again, we must remember that we have the struggle 
as distilled through the alembic of the apostle's heart. It is 
scarcely possible that Paul could record such a conflict — one 
in which he had borne so vital a part, and whose subsiding 
billows still heaved like the tossings of a spent storm through 
his daily experience, and from which he had been so de- 
livered, without touching its leading features with the retro- 
spective tinge of his Christian consciousness. The believer, 
who is gathering up into his own personality the elements of 
the universal experience of humanity, cannot but interpene- 
trate the portraiture with some tokens of his regenerated feel- 
ings. He will describe the conflict, not so much as it appears 
to the person who is blindly, darkly waging it, as in the way 
in which it finally discloses its full significance to his enlight- 



40 THE MORAL CONFLICT OF HUMANITY. 

ened spiritual perception. From his higher ground of spirit- 
ual illumination he now discovers the precise elements and the 
real scope of the conflict, and he can hardly contemplate that 
strife and that victory, that darkness and that light, the infi- 
nite wretchedness of the bondage and the infinite blessedness 
of the salvation, without giving utterance to the emotions 
which they inspire. Hence the piercing shriek of the help- 
less combatant ; hence the exultant welcome of the dawning 
deliverance. But though thus cast in a Jewish mold, and 
embodied in the personality and tinged with the reflex senti- 
ment of an apostle, the contest is substantially that of the 
natural man of all ages struggling under his convictions of 
moral duty, whether gathered more faintly from the dim dis- 
closures of the reason, or more clearly from the express enact- 
ments of the law of God, — and struggling in vain. It is the 
slavery of human nature — until endowed with spiritual free- 
dom and power through the cross of Christ. 

But having looked at and, as we believe, obviated the main 
objections to our interpretation, to make assurance doubly 
sure, let us follow the apostle a moment into the next chapter, 
and mark the contrast there presented to the painful por- 
traiture which we have been contemplating. " I thank God," 
says the apostle, looking back upon his former self in the light 
of his present self, " through Jesus Christ our Lord ! He will 
deliver me from this body of death." And with the opening 
of the next chapter the deliverance has come. My condition 
is completely reversed. Before, I was in the flesh, and pre- 
dominantly carnal ; now I am spiritual. Before, I was sold 
under sin, and its helpless captive and slave ; now the law of 
the Spirit of life has made me free from the law of sin and 
death. Before, sin ruled as a tyrant in my flesh ; now the 



TWO MARKED ANTITHESES. 41 

Son of God has condemned sin in my flesh. Before, I could 
will indeed, but willing was fruitless, and performance was im- 
possible ; now the righteousness of the law is fulfilled in me, 
who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. The " law 
of my mind " has thus given place to the " law of the Spirit " ; 
the weakness of the law through the supremacy of the flesh, has 
been replaced by the divine energy of the gospel ; its enslaviDg 
and condemning power by the emancipating and pardoning ef- 
ficacy of the blood of Christ. Its spirituality is now met by an 
answering spirituality in myself. The two states are the com- 
pletest possible antitheses to each other. They have nothing 
in common but the wretched bondman of the one, transformed 
into the exultant freeman of the other. They are separated from 
each other by the whole diameter of the moral being. That 
helpless slave, that wretched thrall of sin, working out in 
blind bewilderment the dictates of imperious lust, struggling 
with his chain, and at last uttering forth a shriek of agony 
and despair, is he the man whom we now behold exulting in 
spiritual freedom, and producing in joyous spontaneity the 
fruits of righteousness ? Not unless every law of language is 
reversed. Passing from the seventh to the eighth chapter of 
the Romans is passing into a new atmosphere, is entering a 
new world. From a chaos of convulsed and conflicting ele- 
ments we emerge into harmony, and light, and joy. No more 
being in the flesh ; no more sold under sin ; no more servile 
and hateful task-work ; no more bowing of my Godlike reason 
in hateful bondage to the flesh ; no more abortive endeavor 
to keep a law which, while it commands my homage, utters 
my condemnation ! All this has passed away -forever. It is 
superseded by a new state of spiritual freedom, purity, and 
progress, of assured victory and everlasting triumph. 



42 THE MORAL CONFLICT OF HUMANITY. 

But do we degrade the passage by transferring its struggle 
from the bosom of the Christian to the larger sphere of uni- 
versal humanity ? Is this conflict of the ages, this sad em- 
broilment of man with himself, this moral civil war, unworthy 
of a record by the inspired pen of the apostle ? Rather, is it 
not eminently suitable that a discussion, whose grand thesis is 
universal guilt and universal condemnation — no justification 
by deeds of law, whether written on tables of stone or on the 
tablet of the natural conscience— should wind up with a liv- 
ing picture of the struggle under that law, its inspirations, its 
impotence, and its despair ? Is not this a fitting background 
— this black canvas of the world's spiritual thralldom — on 
which to portray the glorious deliverance of the gospel? 
Look back over the preceding chapters of the Epistle, and 
you will see how completely the apostle has prepared the way 
for this delineation. It is the natural summing up of that 
whole dark picture of depravity and ruin, of bondage under 
the double, yet identical law of Sinai and the conscience ; the 
gathering up of all its elements into one bitter and deadly 
experience. It is the whole moral life of humanity con- 
centered in the tempestuous convulsions of a single soul. This 
struggle is to Paul, as it is in fact, real, earnest, and pro- 
foundly significant. It is, next to the gospel, and as prepar- 
atory to the gospel, the one vital, interpretative fact in the 
moral history of the race — the key to the mystery of its deep- 
est strivings. The consciousness of sin, the vague but dark 
sense of moral derangement and the endeavor to repair it, 
have called forth the resources of legislation and philosophy ; 
for this, government has reared its elaborate framework, and 
constructed its penal code ; for this, sages have explored the 
heights and depths of speculation. The divine philosophy of 



THE FOE AND THE CONFLICT. 43 

the Academy sought by raising its votaries to the communion 
of the eternally good and fair, to emancipate them from the 
thralldom of moral evil. Aristotle lavished the resources of 
the subtlest intellect of earth on a system not merely of ideal, 
but of practical virtue. The rugged doctrines of the Porch, 
proclaiming the sole excellence of virtue, and the sufficiency 
of the good man to himself, sought to lay a solid basis of vir- 
tuous attainment. The moralist has labored through long 
years to fashion and consolidate those elements of upright 
character which should meet his high ideal. But all in 
vain. The most stringent ordinances of legislation, the most 
energetic forms of government, the most splendid systems of 
philosophy, the purest codes of morals, the most thoroughly 
disciplined individual virtues, have been tossed like a feather 
in the tempest, on the surging tides of human passion. The 
evil has been substantially untouched. 

This ^ineradicable taint of sin, 

This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree, 

has still shed over the universal heart its poisonous influence, 
and no character so pure as to escape its contamination, no 
virtue so vital as not to wither beneath its breath. Deep in 
the central heart of humanity, unreached by the will, has lain 
that dark, mysterious, fathomless fount of evil, welling up 
with exhaustless vitality in every human bosom, and in every 
age and clime pouring forth its waters of bitterness and 
death. 

Such are the foe and the conflict of unaided humanity ; and 
when the revealed law of God enters the arena, it intensifies, 
but changes neither the essential nature, nor the issue of the 
struggle. Sin appears more hideous, virtue more divinely 
fair, and alike the authoritv, the excellence, and the threaten- 



44 THE MORAL CONFLICT OP HUMANITY. 

ings of the law combined to enforce its claims. But all still 
in vain. Sinai is as powerless as the halls of heathen justice ; 
the Synagogue is as inoperative as the Academy or the Porch ; 
the law traced by the finger of Jehovah on tables of stone is 
as unavailing as the law traced less distinctly, but even more 
indelibly, on the living tablet of the conscience. Both are 
alike impotent against the dreadful league of flesh and sin. 
Human lust is mightier than " all that saint, sage, or sophist 
ever writ," backed by the immediate interposition of Jehovah. 
Under that Mount that burns with fire, beneath the very 
thunders of his voice, it will turn to its sensualities and its 
idolatries. 

In the presence of the revealed law, then, sin only comes 
out into fuller hideousness and more terrible power ; becomes 
more intensely malignant, more "exceeding sinful," and 
wields its scorpion lash with fiercer fury over the soul. Then 
the writhing spirit gnaws its chain in desperate anguish as it 
awakes to the double conviction of the magnitude and the 
hopelessness of the struggle. As the forms of ideal virtue 
which it had before half courted, half shrunk from, and 
played with in sportive dalliance as they seemed now just dis- 
solving into the airy forms of imagination, now limned in 
sterner outline to the clear eye of the reason — as these concen- 
trate and embody themselves in the immediate, authoritative, 
unrepealable mandates of Jehovah, then comes the grip, the 
crisis, the agony of the struggle, the sense of utter impotence 
and awful bondage, of the dire malignity of the fiend who 
enthrones himself in the flesh, and in the very teeth of the 
dictates of prudence and the reproaches of conscience ; in the 
face of all that reason can discern of abstract goodness and 
all that revelation can disclose of infinite majesty and excel- 



A MELANCHOLY PICTUKE. 45 

lence, drives his victim with reluctant step, but with open eye, 
iuto the gulf of despair and the flames of perdition. It is 
this struggle, going on everywhere, where man has not sunk 
to the level of the brute, and indicated in every deprecatory 
prayer, in every bloody rite of superstition, in every slaugh- 
tered victim, in the fruit of the body given for the sin of the 
soul, in every form of ascetic devotion, the sackcloth, the fast- 
ings, the vigils, the self-scourgings and tortures, all submitted 
to pacify the vindictive Nemesis that lives eternal in the 
human conscience, in every moral aspiration, in every sigh 
of penitence and pang of remorse. It is this quenchless, all- 
pervading , everlasting conflict which, with a pen of light 
and fire, the apostle has drawn out in the seventh of Romans. 
And here too, we have the divine deliverance from this awful 
bondage ; the Canaan of heavenly peace, which awaits the 
toiler over this dreary desert of Sinai and of sin. What a 
flood of holy gratitude, what a fathomless tide of joy gushes 
up in those triumphant words : " I thank God, through Jesus 
Christ our Lord ! " 

And finally, if from this interpretation of our passage, the 
disciples of Pelagius and Arminius can gather aid and com- 
fort, they are welcome to do it. If it sheds any particle of light 
favorable to their assertion of the native innocence and good- 
ness of man, we fail to see it. Surely they knew not 
what they did, when they took such an ally into their camp. 
It is, to my mind, the darkest and most decisively melan- 
choly picture of the natural condition of humanity — of its 
obstinate and determined bias to evil, that is contained in the 
sacred records. There is scarcely between the lids of the Bible 
another passage which goes so thoroughly to the central core 
of human depravity ; which tears away the veil of spiritual 



46 THE MORAL CONFLICT OF HUMANITY. 

self-conceit with so relentless a hand ; which so blasts, as with 
mildew, every springing germ of legal righteousness. What- 
ever of good it discloses lies in that intellectual and volitional 
part of our nature which God has still left within us as his 
abiding witness ; but all the practical and effective forces are 
under the dominion of evil. The passage, thus understood, is 
the great bulwark of Calvinism, the natural ally of the pro- 
foundest views of original depravity, and the moral bondage 
of the human will. It is Paul's standing protest against all 
those rose-water theories of human nature which represent it 
as just ready to develop angelic qualities, and spring up into 
its native realm of purity and bliss. No. Deep in man's soul, 
it shows a dreadful monster to be expelled, a gigantic despotism 
to be overthrown, a malignant power that corrupts his affec- 
tions, enthralls his will, nullifies every moral endeavor, resists 
effectually all that man or God can do for his redemption, 
until the atoning blood and the spiritual power of the Cross 
break the tyranny, and lead him forth into the glorious free- 
dom, the progressive sanctification, and the upward path of 
the children of God. 



II. 

RENOVATION OF PHYSICAL NATURE AT THE 
RESURRECTION. 

' ' ~C^OR I consider that the sufferings of the present time 
J- are not worthy of comparison with the glory which 
is about to be revealed to us. For the longing desire of the 
creation is awaiting the manifestation of the sons of God, — for 
it, the creation, was subjected to frailty, not of its own will, but 
on account of him who subjected it, — in the hope that the 
creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of 
corruption into the glorious freedom of the children of God. 
For we know that the whole creation groaneth, and is in pangs 
together until now. And not only so, but ourselves also, 
though having the first-fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves 
groan within ourselves, awaiting our filiation [the sonship], 
the redemption of our bodies" (Rom. 8 : 18-24). 

It is not my purpose to review the various opinions which 
have been entertained respecting this passage, by different 
interpreters. It has not only called forth the resources of in- 
dustry and learning, but given ample scope to the vagaries 
of fancy. When the right interpretation shall be given, it 
will probably carry with it its own evidence, — an evidence 
obviating the necessity of exposing all the absurd theories and 
whimsical conjectures of all who have shed the darkness of 
their own false reasonings upon the illuminated pages of in- 
spired truth. Already, I believe, this passage has yielded 

47 



48 RENOVATION OF PHYSICAL NATURE. 

in a great measure, if not entirely, to the sober and 
searching methods of modern investigation ; to that dili- 
gent examination of words and phrases which, however 
humble an employment it may seem to furnish, is yet 
our only avenue to a certain and satisfactory knowledge 
of things, the portico of the grand temple of religious 
truth. The biblical student of comparatively humble ac- 
quisitions can smile at many of the fanciful conjectures 
and fruitless, because ill-directed, efforts of men, with 
whom in ability or learning he would be far from chal- 
lenging a comparison. Even now, I believe, both in this 
country and in Germany, there is a gradual approximation 
toward harmony of views. It could not, perhaps, be expected 
that a passage like the present, of difficult and long contested 
import, should in all points be satisfactorily settled by the 
efforts of any single mind. One will, perhaps, strike out the 
general idea, — will seize upon the clew, by whose guidance 
others will thread the labyrinth, until at last all its intrica- 
cies are unravelled and its recesses explored. 

I do not propose to comment separately upon all the words 
and phrases of the passage, but to touch lightly upon those 
on which there is no difference of opinion. I shall dwell 
rather upon those portions which are essential to a right ap- 
prehension of the general scope of the passage. Its key- 
note is struck in the verse immediately preceding that 
with which my translation commences. " And if children, 
then heirs; heirs of God, and joint heirs with Christ; if 
we suffer with him (GUjutdaxetv), that we may be also glori- 
fied with him (euvdoZaffOaj/xev)." Thus bringing the suffer- 
ings (TzadrjfiaTOL) of Christians into immediate contrast with 
their future glorification (86%a), the mind of the apostle 



THE POINT OF VIEW. 49 

instantly takes fire. In a manner strikingly characteristic, 
he proceeds to give utterance, as far as he is able, to the con- 
ceptions by which his soul is filled. But what is the point 
of view from which he contemplates the glory that is to be 
revealed to the sons of God ? On what stage in the career of 
the sons of immortality does he fix, as furnishing the most 
full and perfect contrast to the weight of suffering, that" bows 
them in this vale of tears? In other words, what is the 
period referred to when they are to be glorified together 
(r7t»v(5yfatf#<5//£v) with Christ? For, that one and the same 
period is indicated by this and the following expressions, — 
the glory which is about to be revealed to us (r^v ;j.£Xh>uaav 
dd^av aTzo7.olu<pd-r i vai tlq ypaq'), — the manifestation of the sons 
of God (rijv dnoxdAucptv tujv ulwv rod deoo), the glorious freedom 
of the children of God ; and finally the sonship, — the ransom 
of our body, — that all these expressions, I repeat, point to 
one and the same occasion, does not, I think, admit a doubt. 
And what is the occasion? We are pointed most dis- 
tinctly to the general resurrection. Overleaping all the in- 
tervening period, and overlooking, as it were, all preceding 
and minor displays of the Christian's glory, the mind of the 
apostle fastens upon the time when the glorified body, raised 
from the dust in renovated youth and beauty, shall be re- 
united to the glorified spirit, and the relation of the children 
of God shall be recognized and announced before an assembled 
universe. Let us recur for a moment to the expressions as 
they oGCur. When, according to the representations of the 
New Testament, are Christians to be glorified together with 
Christ (<Tuvdo2a<Ttta)/jLev) ? When, in the only sense acknowl- 
edged by the Scriptures, is to take place the manifestation 
(rijv &7toxdku<piv) of the sons of God ? Compare here Col. 
E 



50 RENOVATION OF PHYSICAL NATURE. 

3:4: " When Christ our life is manifested, then shall ye 
also be manifested with him in glory." Compare too, 1 
Thess. 4 : 13, a passage directly relevant to our subject. And 
to what period, again, may we so justly refer the glorious free- 
dom of the sons of God, as to that which witnesses their 
triumph over death, the last enemy, and emancipates their 
entire nature from the thralldom to which sin had subjected 
it ? But if the above expressions left any doubt, it is dissi- 
pated by the final, most explicit statement of the apostle him- 
self, in which he couples the filiation (oluOeaia) — evidently an- 
other expression for the manifestation of the sons of God 
(aTzoxdluil'iv r. u. r. 0.) — the full and public recognition of 
their relation, and their investiture with the glory which 
belongs to it — with the redemption of the body ^dnoXorpuxnu 
rod ffcufxaroq'), making the two circumstances, if not identical, 
at least coincident in time. 

Here then, it seems, is an important clew to guide us in the 
interpretation of the passage. And we cannot avoid the con- 
viction, that here many of the interpreters have more or less 
failed. Some throw the resurrection entirely out of view. 
Others, who admit a reference to it, yet fail to give it due 
prominence, — to make it the foreground of the picture, — to 
let it occupy that place which it manifestly occupied in the 
mind of the apostle. I think the phraseology of the passage, 
especially taken in connection with the general tenor of the 
New Testament representations, forces upon us the conviction 
that the apostle here refers definitely to the period of the 
resurrection, and that, not so much because this was the ad- 
vantageous view from which to draw the contrast, but be- 
cause this was ever uppermost in his mind, when he reflected 
on the future glory of the people of God. Indeed, it cannot 



A FRUITFUL THEME. 51 

have escaped the attentive reader of the apostolic writings, 
how frequent and striking are the allusions to that period, 
and how it pervaded and colored all their religious hopes. 
The passage which we have quoted from Col. 3 : 4, is full of 
significance, and furnishes a striking commentary on that 
under consideration. " Ye are dead," says the apostle, " and 
your life is hid with Christ in God." The Christian life is 
now hidden, concealed. In his separate existence, and real 
character, he is scarcely recognized. When, then, is he to be 
manifested ? When honored with the title, and clothed with 
the glory, that belong to his station. When, in other words, 
is his manifestation (aizoxdXo^^ — his filiation (ulodsaia) — 
to take place? " When Christ, our life," proceeds the 
apostle, " is manifested, then shall ye also be manifested with 
him in glory." 

In 1 Cor. 15, this topic furnishes the theme of one of the 
most animated and eloquent discussions found on the pages 
of this always animated writer. He shows how it follows the 
death of Christ, and pre supposes it; how it involves the very 
cardinal doctrines of the gospel, and is a vital element of the 
Christian's faith and hope. He dwells upon its scenes and its 
practical uses, with a minuteness, a variety, and a fullness, 
which show that it absorbed the energies and interests of his 
soul; that it was with him an ever-present and inspiring 
truth, held not merely as a tenet essential to the complete- 
ness of a scheme of doctrines, but as a truth fruitful of prac- 
tical influences and heavenly consolation, — pressing on his 
heart with the might of a near and overwhelming reality ; 
the consummation and glory of the gospel ; the grand object 
of Christian hope; the grand incentive to Christian faith- 
fulness. 



52 EENOVATION OF PHYSICAL NATURE. 

It will not, I trust, be irrelevant in this connection, to pre- 
sent a passage of some length, from 2 Peter 3 : 10-16. T 
shall give it with a few not perhaps very necessary devia- 
tions from the common version : " But the day of the Lord 
will come as a thief, in which the heavens shall pass away 
with a crash, and the elements shall burn and be dissolved, 
and the earth and the works in it shall be burned up. While 
then, all these things are being dissolved, what manner of 
persons ought ye to be in all holy conduct and godliness, look- 
ing for and hastening on the coming of the day of God, in 
which the heavens being wrapt in fire, shall be dissolved, and 
the elements shall burn and melt. But we, according to his 
promise, look for a new heaven and a new earth, wherein 
dwelleth righteousness. Wherefore, beloved, seeing that ye 
look for such things, be diligent that ye may be found of him 
in peace, without spot and blameless, and consider the long-suf- 
fering of the Lord to be salvation. As also our beloved 
brother Paul, according to the wisdom given unto him, hath 
written unto you, as also in all his epistles speaking con- 
cerning these things." 

This interesting passage needs no comment ; compared 
with Kom. 8 : 19, 1 Thess. 4 : 13-18, 1 Cor. 15, it sheds a 
flood of light upon the uses which the apostles made of the 
doctrine of the resurrection. 

If I have succeeded in settling this point, the way is opened 
for deciding, satisfactorily, upon the meaning of the much 
contested xTfotq. I need not dwell upon the origin and possi- 
ble significations of this word. Derived from (xriZetv), to 
create, it denotes primarily the act of creating ; secondly, as 
synonymous with (xriaixa), the thing created, the creation. It 
has, I believe, in its ordinary use, about the same latitude as 



THE NEW CREATION. 53 

the word creation, and may, according to its connection, 
refer chiefly to inanimate nature, or include sentient beings. 
That it is ever, or could be without the utmost harshness, em- 
ployed to denote Christians, there is no evidence. The ex- 
pression (y,aivi) xrtfftq), a new creature, or a new creation, fur- 
nishes no ground for such a supposition. The question, then, 
is between that view of it which includes and refers chiefly 
to sentient beings, and that which refers exclusively to inani- 
mate nature. Does it, in other words, in the passage under 
consideration, denote men in general, mankind, or inanimate 
existence, nature f If the view which I have taken above be 
correct, the question is easily, nay, is already decided. The 
xrifftq is introduced as looking with earnest longing for the 
period when the sons of God shall be manifested, in the hope 
of sharing in their glorious deliverance. Is this true of the 
world of unconverted men ? Could the heathen of, or before 
the age of the apostle, be said, in any possible sense, to be 
anticipating the resurrection period, with the hope of being 
themselves participators in its benefits? This point is too 
plain to need argument. Of all the doctrines or facts un- 
folded in the word of God, — of all the truths discoverable 
by reason of which the gospel is the depository, none, per- 
haps, bears so decidedly as this the impress of its super- 
human origin — none is so far from having visited the 
loftiest visions of the sublimest speculators. The Pytha- 
gorean metempsychosis bears to it no analogy. Theologians 
have fancied that in the Platonic triad they could discover 
the germ of even the mysterious doctrine of the Trinity. 
The sacrifices of the pagan world have been regarded as em- 
bodying a dim conception of the atonement. But the resur- 
rection of the dead is, we might perhaps say, the one great fact 



54 KE NOVATION OF PHYSICAL NATURE. 

that belongs exclusively to Christianity. It is certainly a 
fact, of which there is no evidence that it had ever entered 
the conception of man, until " life and immortality were 
brought to light through the gospel." And had it occurred 
to the minds of the pagans, it could not have come as a wel- 
come doctrine. Plato states it as the prerogative of those who 
had purified their souls by philosophy, that they were ex- 
empted from the necessity of re-entering a body when they 
had once "shuffled off this mortal coil." The body was 
regarded as always and necessarily an enemy to the freedom 
and purity of the soul, and the pagan could have conceived 
no process, as either probable or possible, by which the spir- 
itualized body should become at once the handmaid of its 
virtues and the promoter of its enjoyments. And, keeping 
distinctly in view the scriptural doctrine of the resurrection, 
all reference to that " longing after immortality," which agi- 
tates the breast of universal man, those high aspirations 
which indicate at once his origin and destiny, become en- 
tirely irrelevant. However true in point of fact, they have 
no bearing on the case before us. 

The only meaning then, which remains for (xt{<tl<;) creation 
in the present case, is the inanimate creation, nature. By an 
animated, we do not say bold, prosopopoeia, the writer intro- 
duces universal nature as longing for the period of the com- 
plete emancipation of the sons of God. The argument is 
a fortiori — for it contains the substance though not the 
form of an argument. It reasons from the less to the 
greater. If the benefits to be reaped by irrational existence 
from the scenes of that day are so great as to justify it in 
earnestly expecting them, what shall be its results to immor- 
tal intelligences — the sons of God — who are to be the princi- 



A PERVASIVE SENTIMENT. 55 

pal participators in its glories ? If its subordinate and inci- 
dental results are so unspeakably desirable, what may they 
anticipate on whom it shall confer its " weight of glory ? r 

The sentiment derived from this interpretation is amply 
sustained by other declarations of Scripture. I will not go 
back to the prophetic writings, although it is certain that 
among the Jews there existed a belief in the future renova- 
tion. Neither would I lay much stress on the renovation 
(jcaXtYYsvsaia) of Matt. 19 : 28, or the restoration of all things 
(aizoxardaraaew^-KdvTwv) of Acts 3 ; 21, as these expressions 
are too general to be a safe foundation for argument. When, 
however, the fact is clearly made out from other sources, they 
may justly be regarded as corroborative evidence. We need 
but appeal to the passage already quoted from Peter, in a 
similar connection, to place the matter beyond a doubt. 
But " we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and 
a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness." The words, 
" according to his promise," decidedly oppose our interpreting 
this as the mere figurative language of prophecy. It points 
us to some specific promise made by the Saviour, while on earth, 
and a general expectation as the result of that promise. Here 
is no evidence of a state of prophetic rapture, but a declara- 
tion of a universally pervading belief, founded on the explicit 
testimony of Christ himself. But, even conceding the repre- 
sentation to be a ;j.uftoq, myth, and that they did not expect 
a literal renovation of the heavens and earth, still, inasmuch 
as Peter has employed this mode of representation, why may 
not Paul have done so, when treating of the same subject? 
Especially as it is in connection with this general topic 
that Peter quotes Paul, as having treated largely upon these 
subjects in his epistles. 



56 RENOVATION OF PHYSICAL NATURE. 

But this general view receives still farther confirmation 
from a right understanding of the clause contained in the 
parenthesis. We have connected & kknidi, in hope, not with 
uTzsTdyT], was subjected, but with dite/Mzezat, is awaiting. It 
thus introduces the reason of the anxious longing of the xriatq, 
creation, for the period in question. The construction seems 
thus more simple and unembarassed, and will, we think, com- 
mend itself to the judgment of the reader. The clause in the 
parenthesis, then, intimates the reasonableness of the expecta- 
tion entertained by the -/.xiaiq, creation. The reason is, that it 
had no agency in the act which subjected it to its state of 
bondage, but, guiltless itself, was so reduced solely on account 
of another. We give to dtd, its ordinary meaning, with the ac- 
cusative, viz., in consequence of, on account of, and thus refer the 
tov v-ord'^avra, him who subjected it, to man, as it seems diffi- 
cult to see in what sense it could be referred to Jehovah. If we 
give to did the signification of uxo, by, with the genitive, thus 
representing Jehovah as the agent, a meaning sufficiently cor- 
rect is, indeed, made out, but one having no obvious relevancy 
to the design of the apostle. That of the other is clear and 
striking. The earth was not brought into subjection on its 
own account. " Cursed is the ground for thy sake/' is the 
emphatic declaration of the Judge to the guilty man, and one 
which sets in a striking light the truth of the passage before 
us. As it was not then by its own agency, or for its own 
guilt that it was subjected, but solely as the innocent partici- 
pator in the punishment of another, the creation may rationally 
hope — such is the tacit implication,— that when the last ves- 
tiges of the curse are removed from the offender, the unwilling 
and unoffending sharer in the curse shall receive a like liber- 
ation. There is a tacit appeal to the justice of the Deity, an 



A PALINGENESIS. 57 

implied assertion that he will not suffer the innocent victim 
to remain involved in evils from which their guilty author 
has been liberated. This idea might receive a much more 
extended elucidation than I can now give it, and one which 
would go far to establish, on independent grounds, the proba- 
bility of the future restoration of the material world. And 
the natural period of such a renovation would be the time 
when it had ceased to be the repository of the sleeping dust 
of sin-ruined, but ransomed man — when death, the final 
enemy, is annihilated by the resurrection of the bodies of the 
believers to life and glory. What more natural, what more 
consonant with all we know of the Divine economy, than that 
in the moment when physical nature, which was molded 
by the plastic hand of its Creator into innumerable forms of 
beauty and perfection, and scanned by the Omniscient eye 
was pronounced " good," shall spring from the bondage of its 
corruption, be freed from the stains of sin, and, renovated and 
beautified, become the meet abode of righteousness ? Christ 
was revealed that he might destroy the works of the devil. 
One of these works was the subjugation of the natural world 
to natural, as a faint type of moral, evil. The curse which 
was laid upon the earth, was as much the result of the 
malignant efforts of the great adversary, as the death, tem- 
poral and spiritual, inflicted upon Adam and his posterity. 
And does not the full accomplishment of the avowed purpose 
of the Son of God's appearing, his complete triumph over 
death and the devil, who has the power of death, require 
that he rescue the earth also from the evils which it shared, 
in common with its guilty inhabitants ? 

I have dwelt so long upon the main topics involved in the 
passage, that I have room but for a brief comment upon a few 



58 RENOVATION OF PHYSICAL NATUKE. 

of the particular words that have not already been noticed. 
AoyiZoiiat, I reckon, compute, estimate — a weighty term, and 
peculiarly forcible, where the writer is about to balance the 
future glory of the saints against their present sufferings. 
Tap, for ; Prof. Stuart translates it, in this case, moreover. 
There is no reason here for departing from the ordinary im- 
port of the particle. Indeed, we can scarcely conceive a case 
in which the English word for is more appropriate and exact 
as a particle of connection. 

AizuzdluipLv — dsoo, the manifestation, not of the glory of the 
sons of God, but the manifestation of the sons of God; that is, 
the public recognition of their relation. (See Matt. 25 : 31, 
seq. Gol. 3 : 4.) 

MaraoTTjTi, emptiness, vanity, frailty, as appears from the 
duuXeiag <pdopaq, to which it is equivalent. 

Au-crj 7) xziffiq. We should not notice this simple phrase, 
but for a mistranslation of Prof. Stuart, who renders it, " the 
same creation (as if the reading were r) abrr) xziaiq), and pro- 
ceeds to urge against Prof. Tholuck an objection, whose force 
depends entirely on his erroneous rendering. Tholuck infers 
justly " that aory) rj xriaiq indicates a descent from the noble 
to the ignoble part of creation," as much as to say, that the 
xriffiq, creation, longs for the full deliverance of the children 
of God, in the hope that even the xxiaiq, creation itself may 
share in the same glorious freedom. To this, Prof. Stuart 
replies, "that such an exegesis would necessarily imply that 
a higher and nobler xriaiq had been already mentioned, in the 
preceding context, with which the inferior one is now com- 
pared." This would be true, were the reading rj abrrj xrtffiq, 
but as it stands, " even the xxiaic, itself," the very form of expres- 
sion implies that no other xriaiq has been mentioned, but 



AN INVITED COMPARISON. 59 

some other object, for which the xriatq regards the event as 
principally to take place, while itself shall have a subordinate 
and humble share in its results. 

llaaa y /.riaiq, the whole creation, all nature, an expression 
rising in emphasis, and perhaps more extensive in signification 
than xTi'etq alone. I submit the question to those whose more 
immediate province it is to decide, whether, while xrifftq gen- 
erally in the New Testament refers to the material creation, 
Tzaaa y xxiaiq, comprehends also sentient beings. There is 
nothing in the present passage to oppose this view. The izaaa 
ij xrifftq is not represented as looking forward to the resurrec- 
tion, but only as involved in common pain and anguish ; nor 
will any one who knows the force of the connective ob [xovov 3e f 
draw from them an opposite conclusion. 

Aurot rrjv a.7tap%7)v rod HvsupLaroq 'tyovTsg. We ourselves while 
having the first-fruits, both apostles, it would seem, and Chris- 
tians generally. Christians are all alike partakers of the Spirit 
and yet alike groaning in their present state of imperfection 
and suffering, and looking forward to the period of their com- 
plete emancipation. As at the commencement of the pas- 
sage, the apostle couples himself with his brethren, so he does 
at the close. 

I have thus given my general view of this difficult, interest- 
ing, and sublime passage. I willingly leave it to be compared 
with that which makes xriffiq, creation, refer to mankind in 
general. It is readily seen what a stoop the latter requires 
us to make from the elevation to which we are raised on the 
glowing wing of apostolic faith and hope. It, in fact, perfectly 
unchristianizes the whole passage. It degrades " the manifes- 
tation of the sons of God " — their glorious deliverance from 
bondage — their ulodtaia, sonship, the public and solemn cere- 



60 RENOVATION OF PHYSICAL NATURE. 

mony of affiliation, into a something or a nothing, which has 
been anticipated with earnest longing by the whole heathen 
world ! Tell us not that the apostle brings forward such a view 
to cheer his Christian brethren in their state of trial and infirm- 
ity. Ask us not to believe that he has led their minds 
away from their own glorious resurrection — a reality with 
whose truth and importance his mind was all imbued and 
glowing — to a heathen expectation, which never existed, and 
which, if it had existed, was never to be realized ! 
Not only is there no inexplicable lacuna, in the omis- 
sion of the heathen world, or the race of men in gen- 
eral, but such an allusion would have been wholly in- 
appropriate. True, they are no less in bondage to frailty 
and corruption than the natural world ; but it is not true that 
they, like that, can with propriety be represented as look- 
ing forward to the resun 3ction as their period of deliverance. 
And why ? Because it will bring no deliverance to them. 
The world of mankind, so far from welcoming the gospel 
either entirely ignores, or shrinks from it as that which will 
determine irretrievably the perdition of the rebellious. On 
the contrary, there is the utmost propriety in asserting this of 
nature. And why? Simply because it is a fact — at least, 
because it was the current opinion of Christians of that age, 
an opinion sanctioned, or rather originated, by the express 
promise of the Messiah himself. No good reason, then, can 
be shown for denying to Paul the license employed by his 
colleagues in composing the sacred canon. 

With those who regard the figure as unwarrantably bold, 
there will be, we believe, few to sympathize. We will not 
dwell upon the accustomed boldness of oriental and prophetic 
imagery, in which the sea, the earth, the mountains, the val- 



A BOLD RHETORICAL FIGURE. 61 

levs, are macle not only fraught with intelligence and emotion, 
but by a still greater stretch of imagination, are endowed with 
hands, eyes, feet, and made to perform acts corresponding 
to these endowments. The figure in question hardly allies 
itself, in this respect, to oriental imagery. It is a figure, such 
as in every nation and age would spontaneously suggest it- 
self to a vivid and powerful imagination, in the contemplation 
of such facts. What bosom does not thrill with the concep- 
tion — what taste does not readily admit, at once, the pro- 
priety and grandeur of the figure, in which Robert Hall 
represents creation as clothing herself in sackcloth, and a 
shriek of unutterable agony rending the framework of univer- 
sal nature, over the perdition of a single soul ? But when 
the theme is the general resurrection, — with the weight of 
glory which will be bestowed on the people of God, — when 
Omnipotence shall lavish its treasures of grandeur and of 
glory, how immeasurably greater the propriety of represent- 
ing universal nature as instinct with life, and awaiting, with 
earnest longing the happy period in whose results, in them- 
selves inconceivably glorious, it is so largely to participate. 
Bold as the figure seems to a superficial contemplation, it sinks 
into tame propriety by the side of the mighty subject which 
it is designed to illustrate. 

And, finally, may we not find in this passage another instance 
of the use which the primitive Christians made of the doctrine 
of the resurrection ? With what vital energy and animating 
power it came home to their hearts ! How it prompted them 
to labor, supported them in trial, and consoled them in afflic- 
tion ! May not the modern church inquire, how far in this 
respect she has partaken of the apostolic spirit ? The doctrine 
of the resurrection is, indeed, incorporated in our articles of 
F ' 



62 RENOVATION OF PHYSICAL NATURE. 

faith, and occasionally dwelt upon in our preaching and con- 
templations as a sublime truth, a glorious reality. But has it 
due prominence in our reflections ? Do we look and " hasten 
forward " to the coming of our Lord ? Does the Christian 
preacher avail himself of the utmost efficiency of this instru- 
ment, as a means of keeping alive and spreading a deep-toned 
and active piety ? Does it press upon Christians in general 
its motives to obedience ? Is it cherished as a vital doctrine 
of the gospel, intimately connected with the resurrection of 
our Lord, livingly intertwined with all our hopes of future 
blessedness, and animating us to be steadfast, unmovable, 
always abounding in the work of the Lord, inasmuch as it 
conveys to us the assurance and the pledge that our labor is 
not in vain in the Lord ? 



III. 

THE PAKOUSIA AND ITS ATTENDANT EVENTS. 

1 Corinthians 15 : 20-28. 

THE New Testament contains two or three passages which 
may, perhaps, be termed " monadic " in their character. 
While most of the Scripture teachings appear in manifold 
forms and depend for their attestation on no single passage, 
in these the truth, as perhaps of less practical importance, is 
left to their single utterance. Such, if I rightly interpret it, 
is the passage in which Peter declares the personal preaching 
of the risen Christ to the impenitent victims of the Flood. Such, 
though not without one or two other probable allusions (as 
2 Thess. 2 : 3), seems the apocalyptic — symbolical, yet none 
the less real — revelation of the millennial glory of the church, 
followed by a brief apostasy just preceding the final catas- 
trophe. Eminently such, and more signal perhaps than either, 
is the passage indicated at the head of this article, which 
stands alone in revealing one or two remarkable features of 
that critical point when the scenes of time shall open out on 
the issues of eternity. These are the abdication by the Son of 
his temporary universal dominion, and the surrender of his 
vice-royalty to the hands from which he had received it. This 
special point is confined strictly to verses 24 and 28 ; yet, as 
it is intertwined in the entire passage (ver. 20-28), forming a 
connected whole, I propose to include in my discussion also 
the passage in which it lies imbedded. On the abdication, 

63 



64 THE PAROUSIA. 

opinion is nearly unanimous ; the statements of the apostle 
seem too explicit to allow much diversity. On the results of 
the abdication, I fear that my opinions are not wholly shared 
by most interpreters. In the rest of the passage the most im- 
portant question is, whether it teaches a double or triple order, 
or class {tagma), in the resurrection ; and thus, whether the end 
(to riAoq) is the last act of the resurrection itself, or, as the 
language scanned more closely may imply, the closing scene 
following this. 

But besides this, another point : The memorable passage 
(ver. 20-28) which opens this unique glimpse into the world's 
closing scene, — the surrender of the Son's delegated sway, — 
is interposed amid a glowing strain of reflection on the fact 
and the necessity of the Christian resurrection (ver. 3 3-19 ; 
ver. 29-33) on the emptiness, apart from this, of the Christian 
hope, and the wretchedness of the Christian life. The per- 
sistent earnestness of this strain shows how deep a hold it 
has taken on the mind of the apostle ; how the sufferings of 
the infant church are to him matters of the deepest and dark- 
est reality. Follow for a moment his course of thought. The 
resurrection of the dead, he argues, is the logical condition 
of the resurrection of Christ — as the resurrection of Christ is 
the causal condition of the resurrection of the dead. If the 
dead rise not, Christ is not risen, the apostle's preaching is 
false, and the disciples' faith is vain. They that have fallen 
asleep in Christ have perished, and the believer, imperilled in 
the present and hopeless of the future, is the most miserable of 
men. So from verses 12 to 19. After turning away for a mo- 
ment to the brighter and glorious side, he resumes at verse 29 : 
Since what shall they do who are baptized for the dead, — 
whose very baptism pledges them to death, — if the dead rise 



A REMARKABLE PASSAGE. 65 

not ? Why are they so baptized ? Why do alike laity and 
apostles (2 Cor. 6 : 4-10) stand in perpetual jeopardy, live a 
life of daily dying, contend in deadlier than gladiatorial 
struggles, aud push aside the cup of worldly pleasure which 
a wiser atheism commends to their lips ? 

It is now into this course of thought that the apostle has 
interjected at verse 20 the remarkable passage upon which I 
have undertaken to comment. It appears strictly as a di- 
gression, as if he were turning away, iu relief to himself and 
his readers, from that dark alternative, to the brighter side of 
the picture, while however the digression carries forward his 
readers to the climax of his thought, the overthrow of death 
in the resurrection, and to another equally wondrous scene be- 
yond. Christ, he hastens to declare, is risen from the dead, 
the forerunner of his people ; the death-wound inflicted on 
the race by the first Adam is healed by the Second ; and the 
glimpse thus caught, and the vista thus opened into the fu- 
ture, he follows to an issue which we may doubt whether he 
had in contemplation when he started the digression. That 
altered governmental relation of the universe to its Father 
and its Redeemer which follows the resurrection may pos- 
sibly have now first broken upon the vision of the apostle. 

The passage which opens upon the eye of the reader these 
altered relations, I render as follows, making some changes 
which do not in the main affect the thought, but improve very 
materially, I think, the structure and rhetoric of the sentence, 
and bring the apostle's discussion of the resurrection to a 
much more forcible and appropriate conclusion : 

" But as it is, in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead, 
the first-fruits of them that have fallen asleep. For since 



66 THE PAROTTSIA. 

through a man is death, through a man is also the resurrection 
of the dead. But each in his own class ; as a first- fruits, Christ ; 
afterward, they that belong to Christ, at his coming. Then, at 
the last, when he delivereth up the kingdom to Him, who is 
God and Father ; when he shall have brought to naught every 
dominion, and every authority, and power — for he must reign 
until he shall have put all his enemies under his feet — as a final 
enemy, Death is brought to naught." For " He subjected all 
things under his feet. But when he (or, it, viz., the Script- 
ure), saith that all things have been put in subjection to him, it 
is manifestly with the exception of Him who subjected to him 
all things. And when all things shall have been subjected, 
then will also the Son himself be subject to Him who sub- 
jected to him all things, that God may be all in all." 

The passage which opens this vision upon the universe I 
have translated with some changes from the ordinary struc- 
ture, affecting perhaps rather the rhetoric, than any ma- 
terial thought; binding it into one rounded and dignified 
sentence made up out of several unconnected and almost 
choppy sentences, and bringing the whole weighty period 
to converge its force upon the great truth of the resurrec- 
tion. 

In verse 24, which the common construction makes com- 
mence with to riXog, the end, as forming with kp%6i±tvoq, 
understood, the reversed protasis of the conditional orav Tiapadw, 
it seems to me much easier and more natural to give to rd riXog, 
the familiar Greek adverbial construction at the end — at last, 
finally — then to make the orav Tzapadih ryv fiaadsiav, etc., 
the protasis of the conditional construction of which e^aroq 
ty&pdq xaTapyurai 6 ftdvaroq, as a final enemy Death is abolished, 



THE COTJESE OF THE AKGUMEXT. 67 

is the apodosis. And thus the grand and weighty truth which 
the apostle has been engaged, not exactly in proving, but in 
affirming and illustrating, is brought out with a fitting and most 
impressive close, as accompanying and crowning these other sub- 
lime events attending the Parousia. This stands, as it fittingly 
should stand, as the one consummating event and purpose of 
the Parousia, while the preceding sentence, which is strictly 
parenthetical becomes formally so, and leaves the final assertion 
of the great truth of the resurrection to sweep on to its triumph, 
and stated in its most triumphant manner, as the overthrow 
and destruction of Death. This having been accomplished, 
the apostle returns upon his steps, with verse 27, to illustrate 
the new truth of the victory and triumph of Christ which he 
had stated at verse 23, and to which he now proceeds to join 
that other hitherto unrevealed doctrine of the abdication by 
the Son of his transiently assumed vice-royalty, to God, 
who as absolute Deity becomes now sole and universal King, 
while the Son still as ruler over the special newly founded 
kingdom, becomes the Divine-human everlasting sovereign of 
the newly established and newly glorified kingdom. 

I proceed now to the particulars of this wonderfully inter- 
esting passage. 

Ver. 23. Each one (not, every man : ixaaros nearlyr=txa- 
repoq, each of two) divides, I think, the subjects of the resur- 
rection into two classes : Christ and his people, the first-fruits 
and the harvest ; and the harvest consists of " them that are 
Christ's," who are to be raised at his coming. This would 
seem to include the whole body of believers, and not, as must 
be the case if it refers to an assumed premillennial resurrection 
of the saints, to but a small part of them ; for the number of 
the saints who should arise at the opening of that thousand 



68 THE PAROUSIA. 

years could hardly equal, or nearly equal, the harvest of the 
righteous dead that, after a thousand years of the church's 
universal sway — and this all the more if the definite stands 
for an indefinitely larger period — would be gathered in the 
final resurrection. From the Apocalypse a correct exegesis 
rules out, I believe, a double literal resurrection, leaving a 
resurrection, twofold indeed, but twofold in character, and, 
analogously to the twofold deaths, a literal and a spiritual 
one. As the first and literal death is common to all and the 
second is reserved for the impenitently wicked, so — in reversed 
order — the first resurrection is spiritual and belongs only to 
the righteous, the final and literal resurrection is common to 
the race. 1 So the apostle knows but a single resurrection, 
and that at the Parousia, when the Lord shall descend with 
a mighty shout ; when the peal of the last trump shall echo 
through the universe ; when in a moment, in the twinkling of 
an eye, the living shall be changed and the dead be raised, 
and earth and sea, death and Hades, render up their victims 
to the judgment. If then, the Parousia is Christ's final com- 
ing — as the sequel of this chapter and 1 Thess. 4 : 13-17 
show it to be — then the end (to riXoq) cannot mark another 
section of the resurrection, widely separated in time from the 
first. It must mark, as the language plainly indicates, the 
next great event, viz., the Son's surrender of his delegated 
dominion ; or, if it includes also the resurrection, it would 
be under its new category of a triumph over Death, and his 
destruction as the last of the hostile powers. 

Ver. 24. When he delivers up (ozav Tcapadai) and when he 

* The symbolical resurrection of Rev. 20 : 4 answers to that of John 5 : 25. The 
rest of the dead who do not share this triumph, have no first resurrection; they 
only share with the saints their literal resurrection at the final coming. 



AN EVENTFUL ABDICATION. 69 

shall have brought to naught (zaraprrjarj) may be taken as co- 
ordinate, or the second as strictly subordinate to the first. In 
either case they determine as to (to riXog') finally, at last — de- 
claring the one the great signal event, the abdication that 
shall constitute and mark it ; the other the series of events 
that shall precede and condition it, the successive destruction 
of hostile forces, reaching its climax in the overthrow of 
death. Meyer strangely and causelessly places this overthrow 
of hostile powers in the intermediate time, which he assumes 
between the Parousia and the final resurrection. Nothing is 
more remote from the simple Pauline and Scripture doctrine. 
This putting down his enemies is the whole series of the Mes- 
sianic victories from his taking his mediatorial seat. " Sit 
thou at my right hand" (Ps. 110) ; "Ask of me and I will 
give thee " (Ps. 2), declare his final making of his foes his 
footstool in the destruction of his last enemy. And this is to 
precede the resignation, as the resignation winds up and 
crowns all. 

The kingdom (/3a(rtXeiav) now surrendered is that which 
had been promised the Son in his incarnation (Matt. 
28 : 18) and bestowed at his ascension (Ps. 2 ; 110 : 1), when 
God conferred {IxapCaaxo, Phil. 2 : 9) upon him the name 
(xupioq, Lord) that is above every name. This dominion, 
this vice-royalty, received for a specific purpose and a limited 
time he now surrenders to the Father, the absolute Deity by 
whom it was bestowed. 

When he shall have brought to naught (xarapyrjfTTj), etc. 
This abolishment, following the investiture and completed in 
the resurrection, has been accomplished by the Son in his del- 
egated dominion, and has formed the work of his entire 
administration. "Every dominion, authority, and power," 



70 THE PAROUSIA. 

forms a cumulative expression including pleonastically all 
the forms of hostility, whether of men or demons, organized 
or unorganized, that may array themselves against the Mes- 
siah's empire. Of course the terms are not used with any 
definite discrimination. 

To follow out in detail the series of the Son's triumphs over 
his enemies belongs not to my present purpose. I suppose 
that one of these triumphs is found in each individual act of 
human redemption. In a general way they may be hinted at 
when our Lord sees in prophetic vision " Satan like lightning 
fall from heaven," and " as the prince of this world, cast out." 
So in the Apocalypse; the first restriction of his power is 
when he is cast down from heaven — his ejection from his 
dominion, perhaps, as god of this world — and descends in 
great wrath to the earth ; the second, when he is cast out from 
earth, and hurled bound, by Michael the archangel, into the 
abyss ; the third, and final, when with death and Hades, at 
the close of the resurrection, he is plunged into the burning 
lake. 

Ver. 25. " For he must reign ^aadebeiv) until he shall 
have put," etc. This verse declares categorically what the 
preceding verse implies, along with its Old Testament 
authority, the passages in Ps. 2 and 110, both of which de- 
clare what is the purpose and issue of his reign. Whether 
the must (dsl, it behooves) of this verse is the " must " of in- 
trinsic or prophetic necessity, scarcely matters, as the pro- 
phetic necessity rests on intrinsic fitness. It is also indifferent 
that the subduing is in Ps. 110 attributed to the Father 
( " until I shall make," etc.), while here and in Ps. 2, it is 
attributed to the Son. The Son is exalted by the Father 
to his (all but) supreme dominion, that in his own person he 



A LAST ENEMY. 71 

may overthrow his own and his Father's foes. Their inter- 
community of action is too often declared to need illus- 
tration (John 5 : 22). 

Ver. 26. " As a final enemy, death is brought to naught." 
This verse, borrowing its terms " enemy," and " brought to 
naught," states with final emphasis, the resurrection as the 
close of the series. Although it loses perhaps none of its es- 
sential significance by the parenthesis, yet the sentence loses 
its rhetorical, and largely also, its logical character. 

Ver. 26. " As a last enemy," etc. Whatever its construc- 
tion, the meaning of this sentence admits no doubt. It is the 
apostle's triumphant, and in this stage of the discussion, final 
assertion of the resurrection under the aspect of the destruction 
of Death, as the grand foe of the Messiah's kingdom. Many 
questions which this topic raises, it is not my province here to 
discuss. 

Ver. 27. For " he subjected all things beneath his feet." 
This verse is not introduced, as held by Meyer, with the em- 
phasis on ndvza, all things, in proof that the sovereignty of 
Christ extends over death. Rather the matter of the resur- 
rection has been disposed of, as the close of his series of 
triumphs, and the writer now recurs, in explanation of verse 
25, to that sovereignty itself, its origin, limitations, and close, 
as his direct theme ; as conferred by God, and supreme over 
all except the personage who conferred it. For this he finds 
a fitting Old Testament illustration in Ps. 8 : 6, which he 
cites verbally (changing thou to he) ; — For thou didst subject 
all things beneath his feet ; — in which the " all things " de- 
clares the extent of the authority, and the " thou didst sub- 
ject," suggests its single limitation. The stream could not 
transcend its fountain. In the original passage, the being to 



72 THE PAEOUSIA. 

whom all things are subjected, is man. But Paul, like the 
author of the Epistle to the Hebrews (2 : 5-9), finds in it a 
typical reference to the exalted Messiah as the representative 
of -man. The subject is treated by the two writers with char- 
acteristic differences. The author of the Hebrews reasons it 
out after his own fashion. Paul takes it directly for granted, 
though doubtless his mind went through a like process of rea- 
soning. With both, doubtless, the failure of actual humanity 
to realize the psalmist's ideal, occasions its transference to the 
Divine-human personage, the Son of Man, in whom it is ful- 
filled. Here of course the subject of b-niraSev is God ; while 
above, in verses 24 and 25, and below, in verse 28 (unorayrj), 
the subduing personage is Christ. Here the reference is to 
the ideal headship of the Messiah, his formal investiture with 
the sovereignty ; in them, it is the actual subduing of his foes 
in the exercise of that sovereignty. 

"But when he or it (viz: God or Scripture) saith (may 
say) that all things have been subjected to him." This I 
think a more natural construction than that of Meyer and 
others, "when he (viz. God) shall have said," etc. The 
former construction refers it to the preceding bxiragev, re- 
ferring it to the investiture ; the latter refers it to what God 
declares when the purpose of investiture is accomplished and 
all things are actually subdued. The one makes the ndvra 
uTzorivaxrac (all things have been subjected), merely a neces- 
sary variation on the form of the previous ndvra U7c£ra%ev ; the 
other refers it, as in verse 28, to the actual subdual. Either 
meaning is admissible enough ; but it is much more natural 
and easy to find it in the author's reasoning from the import 
of the expression, than the statement of an inference from the 
accomplished fact of subjugation. In this latter case, the otm 



73 

ehrj seems worse than idle. Why should Paul employ the 
awkward circumlocution, iustead of saying " when all things 
shall have been subjected to him," to say " when God shall 
have said that all things have been subjected to him " ? Be- 
sides, it seems less natural to refer to the close of the Son's 
reign the exception actually made at the commencement. 

" It is manifestly with the exception of him who subjected 
to him all things." This, says the apostle, goes without say- 
ing. The Son's authority was, even during that period of 
practically supreme dominion, still in its ultimate character, 
delegated and subordinate. It was so from the nature of the 
case ; from the very nature of the being in whom it was re- 
posed. He was infinite, but he was finite ; he was God, but 
he was man ; he held in his nature an element essentially and 
ineradicably inferior to the divine. He was allied, inti- 
mately and forever, with the creature and the finite, and to 
such a being it was, in the nature of the case, unfitting that 
the supreme administration of the universe should be perma- 
nently entrusted. Authority must go back to its primal 
source, the eternal Father. In the very fact that it was the 
Father who put all things in subjection to him, is involved 
the idea of his subordination. 

Ver. 28. " And when all things shall have been subjected 
to him, then shall the Son himself be subjected," etc. When 
the time and purpose of this vice-royalty, this delegated 
authority, shall be accomplished, this sceptre of apparently 
supreme dominion will be resigned. The subordination which 
before, in the Son's practically supreme rule over all creatures 
and destinies in the universe, had been latent, and as it were 
held in abeyance, shall become open and formal. The Son 
will formally and joyfully retire from the supreme sway which 
G 



74 THE PAROUSIA. 

had been accorded to him, and assume openly and lovingly 
the subordinate place which belongs to him as a subject — in a 
nature and relation voluntarily and irrevocably assumed — 
of the absolute and universal kingdom of the Father. But it 
is evident that the rd 7cduza vxorayjj (all things shall have been 
subjected) of verse 28 bears a different sense from the uTzira^ev 
and Tzavra uTcorivaxrai (all things have been subjected) of 
verse 27. There, the subjection is the ideal subjection, the 
authoritative subjection, which inaugurates the Son's media- 
torial reign ; here, it is the practical subjection, the actual 
subjection, which closes it. Now all enemies have been sub- 
dued and brought to naught, including the gigantic and final 
enemy, Death. 

But having thus abdicated his throne, into what does the 
Son retire ? What relation does he henceforth sustain to the 
Father and the universe ? Does his humanity disappear, and 
the theanthropic personage vanish from the scene, replaced, 
perchance, by the pre-existent Logos in his inscrutable and 
eternal relation to the Father ? Of this the thought is not to be 
entertained for a moment. Deity allied himself with humanity 
forever ; humanity, when it entered Deity, came to stay. Or, 
retaining his humanity, does the Son cease to reign, and sink 
into the level of the loftiest of mere subjects of the divine 
kingdom ? Or, descending from his sole sovereign position, 
does he become a companion with his Father, in a sort of dual 
sovereignty, a half co-equal headship of the universe ? Even 
this, I think, does not explain the scriptural position of the 
Son. He has ceased to be the universal mediatorial king ; 
but he has not ceased to be a king. He has exchanged one 
form of sovereignty for another to which that was but a step- 
ping-stone and preparation. The theanthropic nature was 



THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. 75 

assumed for a special purpose, but not for a limited time. 
The universal theanthropic dominion was conferred both for a 
specific purpose and a limited time. That specific purpose 
was the founding and rearing of a special kingdom — the Old 
and New Testament kingdom of God or " kingdom of heaven,'* 
an imperium in imperio, a kingdom at once spiritual and 
material, at once outward and inward, commencing in an in- 
ward spiritual regeneration, but culminating in a congenial 
outward glory ; embraced in, and swept around by, that larger 
empire over which presides the supreme and infinite Jehovah ; 
but constituting its core, its center, its brightest gem, and its 
richest ornament. This kingdom, originating in a stupendous 
plan of mercy and redemption, has drawn unto itself, as it 
were, the resources, and involved the destinies, of the universe. 
For this kingdom, the mediatorial kingdom was established ; 
this kingdom, unlike that, is to be strictly and absolutely 
everlasting ; and when that comes to an end amid the quaking 
earth, the opening graves, and a dissolving universe, this, 
springing from the ashes of all the kingdoms of the world, and 
triumphing over every foe that has plotted its destruction, 
shall just begin, in completed splendor, the march of eternity. 
This kingdom the Son of David came to earth and to the cross 
to found ; this kingdom he reascended to God's right hand 
and to the throne of universal dominion to bring to con- 
summation ; and when the New Jerusalem, the capital of this 
kingdom, shall descend from God out of heaven to the regen- 
erated earth, the Son shall descend to rule in it and over it 
forever. This is the kingdom typified in the Old Testament 
throne of the Son of David (2 Sam. 7 : 16 : " And thy house 
and thy kingdom shall be established forever before thee ; 
thy throne shall be established forever "). It is the kingdom 



76 THE PAROUSIA. 

of Luke 1 : 32, 33 : " The Lord God shall give him the 
throne of his father David : and he shall reign over the house 
of David forever; and of his kingdom there shall be no 
end " 

I think it is no objection to this view of the kingship of the 
Son that in the symbolical New Jerusalem the "glory of 
God " is united with the light of the Lamb in making its 
illumination. In the Son's pre-incarnate existence the Son's 
being God does not prejudice his special character as the 
" Word " of God. In his mediatorial reign his throne is estab- 
lished at the right hand of God in the heavenly Zion (Ps. 110). 
So in the everlasting sovereignty over the church, that per- 
fect harmony and essential oneness that have marked the 
whole previous revelation of Deity will still belong to the re- 
lations of the Father and the Son. United in creation, in 
providence, and in redemption, the undeniable though mys- 
terious diversity in the triune nature shines forth in alternation 
with its essential unity. The only fitting, the only possible, 
relation for the incarnate Son to sustain in the peculiar and 
especial kingdom which he has founded in his humiliation, 
and has brought to triumph and perfection in his glorifica- 
tion, is that, in subordination to the supreme Sovereign, of its 
King and its Lord. 

It may perhaps be interesting, in a brief recapitulation, to 
recall the various phases of the Son's existence and history 
in the light of the New Testament. He appears in two 
essentially distinct characters : the first, as the pre-incarnate 
Logos ; the second, as the theanthropic Son of Man. In the 
first, he is in no sense radically separable from the supreme 
Deity ; in some mysterious way one with, and distinct from, 
the Father; the expression of Deity ; the Word through 



THE THEANTHROPIC NATURE. 77 

which he spake ; the light through which he shone ; his organ 
of utterance and manifestation to the whole creation ; the ef- 
fulgence of the divine glory and the perfect impression of his 
substance. On the mysteries of this existence the Scripture 
does not dwell, and attempts to shed no light. It lies among 
the inscrutable secrets of the past. 

The second, or theanthropic nature, discloses the Son's ex- 
istence in three distinct stages : first, the stage of humiliation 
in which he assumed the form of a servant and became 
obedient even to the death of the cross. Below the an- 
gels, the messengers of the old covenant; below Moses, 
the human founder of the old covenant; below the hum- 
blest of God's ancient servants, appears He who is yet to 
emerge in a dignity and glory infinitely transcending them 
all, and from the disguise of whose utmost lowliness shine 
forth perpetual flashes of divinity. He sinks on the ship 
into a purely human slumber, yet awakes at the cry of 
his terrified disciples to still, by his word, storm and billow 
into calm. He sinks on the cross helpless into the arms of 
death, and yet even then opens heaven to the penitent robber 
dying by his side. 

The second is that intermediate stage in which he appears 
after his ascension, appointed by the Father regent of the 
universe, " head over all things for the church " ; highly ex- 
alted by a name which is above every name, and guiding the 
affairs of the universe, until the special kingdom that he had 
founded in humiliation shall be consummated in glory ; but 
even in this apparently supreme dominion — supreme to all 
else — yet by virtue of the lower nature which he bears, still 
reigning in subordination to the one absolute Deity, though 
here the subordination is veiled in his glory, as on earth his 



78 THE PAROUSIA. 

glory was hidden in his degradation. But when the purpose 
of the vice-sovereignty is fulfilled, and all enemies to him and 
his church are vanquished, he descends from his apparently 
supreme throne to that glad outward subordination to which 
his alliance with the creature forever destines him. 

But in this third stage, still to reign ; still to hold an 
imperium in imperio ; in the bosom of the eternal Father, 
and under the administration of the absolute and universal 
King, still to hold the kingship of the church which he has 
redeemed, of the kingdom which he has founded, the anti- 
typal Son of David, in the anti-typal Jerusalem, on the re- 
generated earth. Nothing less than such a kingship can 
realize the declaration of God through the prophet to David, 
and through the announcing angel to Mary. Nothing less 
than this can answer to the language of the Apocalypse, 
where, in the New Jerusalem of the saints, the throne of the 
Lamb stands alongside the throne of God (Rev. 22 : 3 — " the 
throne of God and of the Lamb ") ; " God Almighty and the 
Lamb are the temple of it ; . . . the glory of God did lighten 
it, and the Lamb is the light thereof" (Rev. 21 : 22, 23). 
Thus in this consummated kingdom of God, the Father and 
the Son appear in the harmonious and united reign as in the 
Son's outwardly supreme mediatorial reign when he still has 
his seat at the right hand of God (Ps. 110). Throughout 
every step and stage of this wondrous revelation, Father and 
Son appear in the most absolute and perfect unity — always 
distinct and always one. And that Christ — the theanthropic 
— always joyfully subordinate — must always reign as formal 
king over the kingdom which the theanthropic Servant 
founded and the theanthropic Sovereign perfected, would 
follow from the nature of the case even if it were not matter 



A JOIXT SOVEEEIGNTY. 79 

of express revelation. " The kingdom of Christ and of God" 
(Eph. 5 : 5), is the fitting designation of its joint sovereignty 
in their mutual relation. Here "Christ," in designating the 
formal relation, naturally stands first. 



IV. 
THE EXALTED NAME. 

"Bestowed upon him the name which is above every name." 
Philippians 2 : 9. 

TPHERE are four names by which our Saviour is familiarly 
J_ known in the New Testament. The first is the personal 
name Jesus (Saviour), which, by direction of the angel, was 
given to him at his birth. It was the token of his humiliation — 
the name which he took when he emerged from the bosom of the 
Virgin into that life of trial and suffering which ended in his 
foreseen death of agony and shame. This was not the name 
that God vouchsafed (J^apiaaTo) to him when he highly ex- 
alted him. It was given to him long before, and he bore it 
through his earthly wanderings, and brought it with him to 
his heavenly exaltation. 

The second name is the name of Christ (xptffroq, Anointed ; 
Heb., Messiah). This was not properly a name ; it was 
strictly an official designation, a figurative appellation, drawn 
from the Jewish usage of anointing, which set apart kings and 
priests to their official work. In his public life, after his 
baptism and the descent of the Spirit had set him apart to his 
work by a figurative anointing, he became in the estimation 
of his more enlightened disciples "the Anointed One," the 
Christ. It was only gradually and later that this became a 
proper name; sometimes simply Christ; more commonly, 
perhaps, united with his personal name in the compound Jesus 
80 



THE NAME IN QUESTION. 81 



Christ. While he lived on earth " the Christ " was always a 
qualitative epithet : after his departure the single personal 
name that had marked his humiliation became much rarer, 
and the previously official designation Christ, or the compound 
Jesus Christ, became prevalent in the church. 

A third name belongs to him in his relation to the Supreme 
Deity, as the Son of God. He habitually spoke of God as 
his Father — his own especial Father — and implying in him- 
self a relation of peculiar sonship. To this name he always 
responded (" the Christ, the Son of the Living God "), though 
his favorite earthly designation of himself was the Son of 
Man : and it was gloriously confirmed to him when, in his 
resurrection and ascension, he was constituted " Son of God 
in power." The author of the Hebrews uses the name with 
great effect when, in illustrating his ineffable majesty, he de- 
clares that "he took his seat at the right hand of Majesty in 
the lofty heavens," becoming as much loftier than the angels 
as his name of Son transcended that of Messenger, which 
belonged to them. They were, like the winds and the light- 
nings, God's messengers ; He. in a relation that knew no 
parallel, was God's Son. 

But there is a fourth name which completes and crowns the 
series, and for which the names Jesus, Christ, Son, unite to 
prepare him. He could not have received it had he not earned 
it as Saviour (Jesus) and Anointed, and been adequate to its 
burdens and honors as Son. But now his earthly work accom- 
plished, his divine nature fully vindicated, and his Father's 
glory fully displayed, he is prepared to carry his associated 
divinity and humanity to the throne of supreme dominion, 
and the honors of universal headship. He is prepared to 
exercise the functions and take the title of Lord. This is 



82 THE EXALTED NAME. 

clearly the title to which the apostle here has reference. This 
alone fits to the description, " the name which is above every 
name," a description which the heart of the believer applies 
indeed to " Jesus," but not in the sense here had in view by 
the apostle. The apostle's reference here is evidently objective, 
not subjective ; it refers to a name intrinsically significant of 
pre-eminent exaltation, a name which God bestowed, conferred 
upon him (^api'varo) as a mark of favor, and which accom- 
panied his elevation. " Jesus " was the name of his lowliness ; 
was given, not conferred ; marked service, not rank ; was 
brought with him to his heavenly throne, not received there. 
I emphasize the use of the verb bestowed, conferred, which is 
not appropriate to the name " Jesus." The two-fold meaning 
of the word " name " in the passage under consideration, may 
here deceive the reader. It means first, as often, " title " (" be- 
stowed upon him the name ") ; secondly, strictly " name " — 
"the name of Jesus." Exchange in the first "name "for 
" title," and the obscurity would disappear. 

All these point to the name " Lord " except the position of 
the name " Jesus." But to a closer observation this bears 
the same testimony. He who had borne this name on earth 
is to be vindicated in heaven, and for this the name (not a 
name) which transcends every other is conferred upon him, 
that every tongue in heaven, earth, and hades may acknowl- 
edge his Lordship. The apostle skillfully prepares the way 
for this climax of his thought. When he wrote " the name 
that is above every name " he had the name " Lord " in 
mind; but with that rhetorical skill which marks his always 
weighty and never artificial style, he postpones its utterance 
till he can precipitate upon it, so to speak, the accumulated 
force of the whole powerful sentence. The word " Jjord be- 



OKD." 83 

comes the apex of an inverted pyramid, denning and con- 
centrating the swelling thought which is held back till it bursts 
its boundaries of expression. Let the reader read thought- 
fully the sentence as a whole, and doubt, if he can, that the 
name " Lord " was that which God conferred upon Jesus 
when he highly exalted him. 



V. 
THE MILLENNIUM OF THE APOCALYPSE. 

Revelation 20 : 4-6. 

rpHE doctrine of the premillennial advent of Christ, with 
A. an accompanying resurrection of the righteous dead, and 
a millennial reign on earth of the glorified saints, has, from 
early Christian times, agitated the church. To the immediate 
successors of the apostles, indeed, it seems to have been un- 
known. But a little later, Papias, Justin Martyr, Irenseus, 
and after them Tertullian, Cyprian, and others following 
perhaps the lead of Papias held it, sometimes almost as a 
test of orthodoxy. Yet it never succeeded in incorporating 
itself into the formal creeds and Confessions of the church, 
and after its short blooming period (from about A. d. 150 
to 250), it became almost universally discredited, and bore 
in the general estimation a strong taint of heresy and enthu- 
siasm. From the age of Augustine, for more than a thou- 
sand years, it had no living hold on Christian belief. Our 
own day has partially revived it, and though generally 
rejected by the practical sense of the church, yet, while 
scholars like De Wette and Diisterdieck, Ellicott and Alford, 
and some eminent Christian preachers maintain it, it can 
scarcely be lightly dismissed as an exploded heresy. Certainly 
the last word regarding it has not yet been spoken, and per- 
haps will not be until the millennial dawn shall shed a clearer 
light on the mysterious book which is alleged to contain it. 
84 



THE APOCALYPSE, PICTORIAL. 85 

I shall attempt no complete discussion of this many-branching 
subject. Waiving the numberless side issues involved in the 
controversy, I shall confine my attention chiefly to the passage. 
The first question is : What light, apart from other Scriptures 
and from its intrinsic tendencies, does this peculiarly apoc- 
alyptic doctrine receive from the Apocalypse itself? Any, 
even slight aid to the elucidation of this point will, I am sure, 
not be unwelcome. 

The point which I would first emphasize is the importance 
of interpreting our passage in harmony with the general 
character of the book ; and for this we must bear distinctly 
in mind what that character is. The Apocalypse, whatever 
historical or prophetical elements may underlie it, is not in 
form a historical, nor even strictly a prophetical book. It is 
throughout, pictorial and symbolical. Not only is the physi- 
cal eye of the seer shut, but the normal action of his intellect 
is suspended. He is translated into an ideal realm, a realm 
which, if he were not under spiritual guidance, would be 
perilously exposed to the sorceries of the imagination. From 
the rising of the curtain at ch. 4 (and the preceding chap- 
ters — certainly the first — are scarcely an exception) we are 
led, under the magic wand of the heavenly mystagogue, as 
through a series of " dissolving views " which present in pure 
symbolism the great crises of the church's history. The 
August Personage who meets us on the threshold, the door 
opened in heaven, and the magnificent panorama that greets 
the vision of the seer, the throne, with its majestic occupant, 
the glassy sea, the encompassing elders and living ones, the 
seven-sealed book of destiny opened, by the Lamb, the 
trumpets and vials with their amazing succession of portents, 
the dragon, the wild beast, the false prophet, the sun-clothed 
H 



86 THE MILLENNIUM OF THE APOCALYPSE. 

and star-crowned woman, the mystical Sodom, the mystical 
Babylon, the New Jerusalem — this slight and cursory glance 
will remind us how completely symbolical is its entire struc- 
ture, and how thoroughly this principle of symbolism must 
pervade its entire interpretation. No matter how distinct 
and emphatic are the utterances to whose literal construing 
we are challenged, the same emphatic distinctness marks the 
portions which, taken literally, would present the merest 
monstrosities. We must remember that the presumption here 
is always against a literal interpretation. To find an event 
recorded on the pages of the Apocalypse is sufficient to assure 
us that while it shadows forth some great truth it is of no 
actual occurrence. To comprehend its import we must trans- 
late it out of its apocalyptic symbolism. Thus the apocalyp- 
tic numbers are generally mystical, and the technical millen- 
nium can scarcely denote a literal thousand years. It must 
be either a mystical number, or, more probably, a round 
number standing for an indefinite but greatly extended 
period. 

And so, taking the collective scene portrayed in our pass- 
age: It shows us the martyrs coming to life, occupying 
thrones, and reigning with Christ during the thousand years 
of Satan's imprisonment. This astounding scene can scarcely 
be regarded otherwise than as symbolical. It is confined to 
this single passage, and it stands here imbedded in symbols. 
The white-steeded rider and the angel standing in the sun (of 
ch. 19), the imprisoned and loosed dragon, with his rousing 
of the nations, and hurling them madly and disastrously 
against the encampment of the saints, all are marked by 
purely symbolical features, shadowing forth mighty realities, 
but in which none would dream of tracing: literal events. 



A SYMBOLIC PASSAGE. 87 

The passage which they thus environed must, by every law 
of consistency, be in like manner symbolical. It is an ideal 
picture, not a record of actual facts. And, if this is so, it 
matters not whether we take the " living " of a bodily resur- 
rection, or in one of the figurative senses which it so readily 
admits. Whatever meaning we put upon the words, the 
passage, as a ivhole, is symbol. It cannot be construed into 
teaching a literal, personal return of Christ at the beginning 
of the millennial period, a literal premillennial resurrection 
of the saints, and reigning during this period with their Lord. 
This is too violent a breaking in upon the ideal character of 
the record ; it is too manifest a joining — like the poet-critic's 
human head and horse's body ending in a fish's tail — of exe- 
getical incongruities. It is islanding in cloud-land a solid 
piece of terra firma. Not to insist, moreover, that nothing is 
said in our passage, or near it, of Christ's coming to earth, or 
reigning upon the earth at this period, this vision of the 
triumphant and reigning martyrs with the reigning Christ, is 
not, even in the symbol, an earthly scene ; and if it were, its 
symbolical character would forbid our taking it as matter of 
pure history or prophecy. 

But, taken as symbolical, what is the import of the sym- 
bolism ? What signify the coming to life and reigning of 
these martyrs, and why do we meet with them just here ? To 
answer these questions, we must turn back to an earlier stage 
in the action of the book. These martyred heroes do not now 
meet us for the first time. We have seen them before, and, 
if I am not mistaken, their earlier appearance goes far to ex- 
plain their present reappearance ; and the two together will 
shed no unimportant light upon the general scheme and 
structure of the Apocalypse. The connection of the two 



88 THE MILLENNIUM OF THE APOCALYPSE. 

scenes has been, indeed, frequently observed, but I doubt if 
its full force has been recognized, and this mainly from a 
failure to see the full significance of the earlier scene. May I 
ask the reader to turn back to the passage in ch. 6, and to 
read afresh the entire chapter which opens the formal action 
of the Apocalypse ? I shall beg his indulgence if the in- 
trinsic interest of the subject leads me to dwell upon the 
earlier imagery to an extent somewhat beyond the exigencies 
of my argument. 

I will barely remind him of the magnificent mise-en-scene 
of ch. 4, which gives us the central stage and starting point 
of the apocalyptic drama. Ch. 5 prepares further the action 
by showing at the right of the throne, the fateful volume 
written within and without to mark its pregnant fullness, and 
sealed with the seven-fold seal of perfect mystery; and by re- 
vealing the intense interest that awaits its disclosures, and the 
rapture that is felt when the " Lion of .the tribe of Judab," 
transformed by the divine magic into the sacrificed " Lamb," 
prepares to open the seals of the scroll, and unfold the series 
of events which his redemptive sacrifice has procured him the 
right, and his heavenly exaltation has given him the author- 
ity, to disclose, and of which his supreme headship of the 
world gives him absolute control. The hosannas that burst 
from the heavenly ranks over distant earth and sea, show the 
profound importance of the impending disclosures. And the 
sublime character and stately movement of these two intro- 
ductory chapters fittingly prelude a drama whose scope and 
denouement involve the supreme destinies of the church 
and the world. Nothing in apocalyptic literature can be 
nobler, nothing diviner, than these fourth and fifth chapters. 
Here surely is no maddening shrine from which are to pro- 



THE ACTION OPENED. 89 

ceed the ravings of the pythoness ; no Sibyl's cave whence 
will be scattered on the winds her frantic babblings. These 
slow, significant, stately images betoken the ordering of God 
and the tread of destiny. 

With the sixth chapter, the action fairly commences. It 
not only gives us the first instalment of the contents of the 
book ; but by opening six oat of the seven seals, it conducts 
us in a general way, down to the very verge of the final con- 
summation. And the opening of the seals at once reminds us 
how, in this " Revelation of Jesus Christ," the one name ap- 
pears supreme " above every name " ; the one personage towers 
above every other. He who in the first vision, stands the au- 
gust ruler and guardian of the church ; who in the second 
vision takes into his hand, as sovereign arbiter, the book of 
destiny ; now, at the head of the third, rides into the lists of 
war, the marshaller of its hosts and the disposer of its issues. 
The opening of the first seal brings forward a rider on a white 
horse, his hand armed with a bow, his head wreathed with a 
crown, going forth "conquering and to conquer." There can 
be no reasonable doubt as to the identity of this personage. 
Every interpretation but one is idle and impertinent. War, 
Victory, Science, Evangelical Preaching, Trajan, Caligula — 
all seem almost wanton deviations from the straight path of 
interpretation. It can be none but Christ, the Lord of the 
church and the world — whose work has originated and whose 
power shall control these grand phenomena — who steps first 
on the majestic stage, with the symbols of power indeed, but 
which mark rather the stage of conflict than of achieved vic- 
tory. In accordance with this, there follow in his train three 
deadly ministers of strife — hostile forces, whose appearance is 
ominous of the dire judgments that are to follow. It is no 



90 THE MILLENNIUM OF THE APOCALYPSE. 

placid and smiling scene upon which the curtain rises. The 
conquering hero is indeed there, giving the assurance of final 
triumph; but war, famine, and pestilence, death in his 
direst forms, are to have for a while their awful way. 

But now why are these formidable powers thus marshalled ? 
What brings upon the stage the Warrior Prince of Salvation, 
and in his train these dreadful ministers of death? The next 
vision tells the story. The opening of the fifth seal shows us 
in symbol the conflict that is raging between the kingdoms of 
light and darkness, of which our earth is the theatre, and in 
which the church has hitherto been, and is yet for a season to 
be, the oppressed and afflicted party. At the foot of the hea- 
venly altar are seen the souls of those who have been slaugh- 
tered for the word of God and the testimony of Jesus, whose 
fidelity to the truth has brought on them the combined rage 
of earth and hell, and the avenging of whose wrongs hag set in 
motion those elements of conflict and woe symbolized in the 
preceding figures. These martyrs represent no individual per- 
sons. They are not the suffering saints of any particular age, 
the victims of any special persecution ; they represent the 
oppressed and persecuted church, the object of the world's and 
hell's hostility, whose sufferings have set in motion this pageant 
of war, and whose impatient cry, " How long, Lord," etc., 
with the answering injunction that they curb their impatience 
till the ranks of their brethren shall be completed, is really 
the watchcry of the coming conflict ; is virtually the key of 
the entire book ; pointing to the scenes of blood and terror 
that are to follow, but — as alike the character of the leading 
rider and the white robes given to the martyrs indicate — 
assuring the triumph in which all is to issue. The cry of the 
martyrs for God's avenging judgments wraps up, so to speak, 



THE DRAMA FORESHADOWED. 91 

all the dire scenes of convulsion and wrath that lie between 
ch. 6 and 19 ; and the response to that cry, in word and sym- 
bolic action, points to the peace and glory which, following 
these lurid horrors, fill the closing chaptersof the Apocalypse. 
I need scarcely remark that the cry of these martyred souls 
for vengeance is not intended as the utterance of the Christian 
heart under persecution or wrong, and needs as such no expla- 
nation or defense. It simply embodies the principle of justice 
which, living in the human conscience, determines God's deal- 
ings with the world, and of which his judgments on the wicked 
are the natural expression. Here, at the head of the process 
of retribution, appear the victims whose wrongs demand it. 
Their words are the impersonated cry of those wrongs, and 
their place right here, just after the glimpse given us of the 
dire agencies that are to work, and in advance of the whole 
body of destructive scenes, is most appropriate and significant. 
It could not be anywhere else in the book with any similar 
propriety. Most fittingly appear at the outset successively the 
Lord of the church, who is to battle for her cause ; the three 
personages that best represent the agencies of wrath and terror 
that are to be brought into action ; and finally the church her- 
self, represented in her agony by her martyred children, and 
to vindicate whose wrongs, and achieve her triumph, the 
whole pictorial drama is brought upon the stage. The drama 
thus foreshadowed, of blood aud vengeance, sweeps on in 
varying forms and episodes to the eighteenth chapter, which 
brings its denouement in the downfall of the mystical Baby- 
lon. The curtain then rises on an altered scene — on the re- 
appearance of the now triumphant Eider with the white horse, 
and the reappearance of the now vindicated martyrs standing 
for the now triumphant church. 



92 THE MILLENNIUM OF THE APOCALYPSlE. 

The stress of the action, then, lies between the sixth" and 
nineteenth chapters. These comprise the events which must 
transpire before the prayer of the martyred saints is fulfilled. 
On the details, or even on the special plan and scope of these 
intervening chapters, it is not my province to dwell. We 
can scarcely doubt that they involve two grand epochs in the 
fortunes of the church : the overthrow of anti-Christian 
Judaism —the spiritual Sodom where " the Lord was cruci- 
fied " ; and of anti-Christian Paganism, the mystical Babylon, 
the shock of whose downfall reaches the extremities of the 
earth. The eighteenth chapter closes the record of this de- 
cisive and awful catastrophe — the final vengeance wreaked on 
her in whom " was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, 
and of all who have been slaughtered upon the earth," the 
power whose gigantic iniquity had absorbed into itself all the 
crimes and hostilities of the earth. 

The great drama, then, has now substantially reached its 
close. The scenes of strife and woe shadowed forth in the 
first four seals are ended, and the hour for fulfilling the 
prayer of the downtrodden and martyr church has come. 
The nineteenth chapter opens this period with a paean over 
the just recorded catastrophe. Then the Eider on the white 
horse of ch. 6, at that time armed for battle and going forth 
to war, now with widely contrasted costume and train, reap- 
pears. On his head many diadems ; his raiment dyed in 
blood ; his name the Word of God ; from his mouth (as in 
ch. 1) a sharp sword issuing; on his vesture and thigh the 
title " King of kings and Lord of lords," and his following 
the heavenly armies on white horses, the symbols of victory. 
An angel, standing in the sun, summons the birds of heaven 
to banquet on the flesh of the overthrown enemies of God, 



THE WHITE-STEEDED EIDER. 93 

while the wild beast and the false prophet are consigned, with 
their worshipers, to the lake of fire. Then descends a mighty 
angel who seizes the Dragon, the arch-enemy, the leader of 
the hosts of evil, and hurls him, bound, into the abyss where 
for a thousand years he shall cease to lead astray the nations. 
And finally, as the white-steeded warring Rider of ch. 6, 
with his dark following, has reappeared with the insignia and 
retinue of triumph, so, to complete and crown the picture, the 
martyred saints of this chapter, there humbled, agonized, im- 
patient over deferred vengeance, now reappear, raised from 
their humiliation to thrones of sovereignty, and sharing during 
the thousand happy years the glory of their Master. No 
longer the cry of " How long, O Lord, wilt thou not avenge 
our blood ? " rings in our ears. The promised hour has come, 
and judgment has been given to them on their once haughty 
oppressors. 1 

Can there be any reasonable doubt who these souls are, and 
what the significance of the entire picture ? Do not the white- 
steeded Eider, with his similarly mounted train, the imprison- 
ing of Satan, the exaltation of the outraged and martyred 
sons of the church, form a striking parallel and antithesis to 
the warring Rider with his sombre following, and the groaning 
victims of earth's and hell's violence in ch. 6 ? The one gives 
the opening of the great drama which runs through the fol- 
lowing chapters, the other its triumphant close. The one 

1 The interpretation here given would determine the proper subject of eKa^iaav, 
they sal upon them ; i. e., persons sat upon them, the indefinite subject being deter- 
mined by the connection, as is not infrequent in Greek. Were this properly a 
judgment scene the occupants of the thrones might be the apostles, according to 
Heinrich. Otherwise we might, with De Wette, Diisterdieck and others, think of 
the four-and-twenty elders. But, as it is, the natural subject of the verb is the 
martyrs, and the judgment given to them is probably the avenging judgment on 
their old persecutors. 



94 THE MILLENNIUM OF THE APOCALYPSE. 

brings on the stage the precursors and dire omens of war, and 
in the bleeding and agonized church, its motive and occasion ; 
the other in the diademed and triumphant king, in the over- 
thrown hosts of darkness and their dungeoned monarch, and, 
finally, in the vindicated and enthroned martyrs, its triumph- 
ant and glorious issue. The one picture explains the other. 
In the former the prostrated and groaning martyrs symbolize 
the church groaning under her tyrannous foes ; in the other 
the enthroned martyrs represent the church disenthralled 
and triumphant. And most significantly and beautifully at 
the head of the one picture appears the great Arbiter of the 
conflict amid the blazonry of war ; at the head of the other 
reappears the same wondrous Rider, a diademed and declared 
victor. The chapters 6, 19, and 20, are mutually interpretative 
and interpenetrative, and are largely the key to the Revelation. 
They interlock and interlace each other across the separating 
centuries. They shed their prospective and retrospective 
light over the tumultuous and stormy scenes that lie be- 
tween. 1 

If this is a just view of the passage, it bars out any thought 

i If we rightly explain this martyr scene then its significance is by n» means 
that which is very commonly assigned to it. Its purpose is not to show that the 
martyr spirit is to prevail during themillennial period. It has no such merely inci- 
dental object as that, but one much more vital to the action of the book. The tri- 
umphant Rider, the imprisoned Dragon, the enthroned martyrs, form a triad of 
symbols marking the triumph of the church, and the third is scarcely the least 
expressive. That the martyr spirit will characterize the millennium we cannot 
doubt ; but that does not seem to be here indicated. And how appropriate a symbol 
of a triumphant church would be, especially to early Christians, this vision of 
reigning martyrs, we need not urge. Its founder was crucified ; its twelve great 
co-founders were murdered like their Master ; its pathway through the early ages 
was deluged with blood, and to be baptized into Christian discipleshipwas virtually 
to be " baptized for the dead " — into fellowship with death and the communion of 
its victims. Surely no better symbol of a victorious, triumphant church could be 
presented to the early centuries than such a vision of enthroned martyrs. 



SYMBOLICAL SCENES. 95 

here of a literal resurrection, of a personal return of Christ 
to the earth, and of any literal millennial reign on the earth 
of the risen saints. There certainly is here no hint of a lit- 
eral coming, or of any coming of Christ to the earth. His 
appearance in chapter 19, glorious as it is, is as purely sym- 
bolical and ideal as the corresponding appearance in chapter 
6. The majestic figure, with its glorious train, sweeps in 
both scenes across the seer's field of vision, and nothing can 
justify our transforming it into a literal or even a symbolical 
return to the earth. Just so there is no literal resurrection 
and reign of the martyrs. Their appearance in chapter 7 is 
symbolical of the wrongs and distress of the persecuted 
church, and their reappearance here, of the accomplishment 
of their prayer for vengeance, and thus of the exaltation and 
triumph of the church which they represent. The literal 
church which they represent is indeed upon the earth ; but 
the symbolical scenes, alike of the afflicted and of the glori- 
fied martyrs, are in heaven or in that undefined region in 
which the apocalyptic visions naturally move. 1 

Nor certainly does the term " living " or " coming to life " 
of the martyrs force us to the idea of a literal resurrection. 
The words " live " and " life " are exceedingly elastic, and 
admit the most various figurative uses. The sinner converted 
to righteousness, lives; moral, spiritual excellence is life. 

1 We are certainly not required by the passage, chapter 5: 10 — "They shall 
reign upon or over the earth" — to understand this appearance of Christ (chapter 
19), and of the martyrs (chapter 20), as a reigning upon the earth. The martyr 
scene itself is not located upon the earth ; the triumphing church, -which the reign- 
ing martyrs symbolize, will indeed be triumphing upon the earth. But the proper 
reign of the saints will follow the consummated kingdom of Christ; and this will 
follow both the millennium and the judgment, and will take place when the New 
Jerusalem, the capital of the kingdom of Christ, shall come down from God out of 
heaveu. 



96 THE MILLENNIUM OF THE APOCALYPSE. 

The wretched man become happy, the unfortunate become 
prosperous, the obscure and degraded raised to dignity and 
wealth, live. These various uses of the word abound in all 
literature, and are to no writer more familiar than to the 
Apostle John. When in John 6, " the dead shall hear the 
voice of the Son of God, and they that hear shall live," the 
reference is clearly to spiritual life. When in the next verse 
they " that are in their graves shall hear his voice, and shall 
come forth, they that have done good to a resurrection of 
life," the " life " is used figuratively for blessedness. Most 
naturally then does the writer designate this elevation of the 
martyrs to triumph and sovereignity as a.living, a coming to 
life, and then by a natural association with the event in 
which we shake off the bondage and degradation of the tomb, 
as a resurrection. No figure can be more natural than this. 
These terms, life, resurrection, are the terms by which we 
naturally designate such a revolution in condition and destiny. 
And in antithesis to the literal resurrection of which all are to 
be partakers, this becomes, in the mind of the writer, a " first 
resurrection " a type, or rather an anti-type, of the material 
and literal rising which awaits all. This " first resurrection " 
is the prerogative of the martyred dead — of course in their 
character as representatives of the church triumphant. The 
rest of the dead have no " first resurrection." They live not 
again until the thousand years are finished. They have only 
the literal coming to life of the final and proper resurrection. 
Hence they receive not the benediction, (i blessed and holy," 
of those who have part in the first resurrection, and no 
promise of going unharmed of the second death. The dead 
who share this moral rising with Christ, who are now uplifted 
and honored with him, will in the literal resurrection awake 



THE TWO RESURRECTIONS. 97 

to everlasting life. The dead who have not this typical ris- 
ing will, in the literal and proper resurrection which awaits 
them, awake to spiritual and everlasting death — the second 
death. Thus the two resurrections are the antitheses and 
correlatives of the two deaths. The first death is literal and 
universal ; the second death is figurative and restricted. So 
the first resurrection is figurative and partial; the second 
resurrection, the final and for the wicked the only resurrec- 
tion, is literal and universal. We are spared the tame and 
superficial division — at once unimaginative and unscientific — 
which cuts the two resurrections mechanically by time into 
two portions, the one earlier, the other later, instead of divid- 
ing them potentially into the higher and the lower, the spirit- 
ual and the literal. "The rest of the dead," the author 
means to say, have no first resurrection ; they have only the 
material and literal one ; x and there can be no objection to 
the mind's playing between the kindred ideas of literal and 
moral living, of a literal and spiritual resurrection, any more 
than between the ideas of a literal and spiritual death. 

1 A different explanation of this language, " the rest of the dead," etc., is pre- 
ferred by some, and thus a different solution of the difficulty involved in explain- 
ing one of the resurrections figuratively and the other literally. They interpret 
the second resurrection, equally with the first, figuratively. They find it in that 
brief assertion of their ascendency by the powers of evil which takes place at the 
close of the millennium. As the saints lived and prospered during the thousand 
years, so at tbeir close the ungodly have their short and illusory triumph. This is 
their period of living and reigning— reigning perchance with their master, the 
devil, and thus their first resurrection. This explanation is plausible; yet it seems 
to me to lower the dignity involved in the weighty words, " Blessed and holy is he 
who hath part in the ' first resurrection,' " in which I cannot but feel that the writer 
recognizes an intrinsic quality in the " first resurrection" that exempts its subjects 
from the second death, and fits them to become kings and priests unto God. I 
think, indeed, that the writer here extends his idea beyond the mere figurative 
"living" — the exaltation and triumphs of verse 4, to that "hearing of the voice of 
the Son of God," which has preceded this exaltation, and is, in the highest sense, 
the " first resurrection." 
I 



98 THE MILLENNIUM OF THE APOCALYPSE. 

But the sequel of this martyr scene refutes, perhaps, still 
more decisively the doctrine of the literal double resurrection. 
When the thousand years are finished, Satan is let loose, and 
asain goes forth to deceive the nations. There is to be one 
last and desperate onset of the powers of darkness on the 
realm of light. They band themselves together against the 
encampment of the saints until fire from heaven destroys 
them. All this, however figurative, proves that the earthly 
life, both of the world and the church, has continued through 
these millennial years. For the conception of the church 
having existed on the earth in its spiritualized and glorified 
state, encircled by or mingled with, a vast alien body of un- 
believing and idolatrous nations, who finally, in some myste- 
rious manner, muster their forces against the glorified sons of 
the resurrection, is too monstrous for a moment's harboring. 
The inconsistencies of Milton's war of the angels furnish no 
approach to it. There spirits are embattled against spirits, 
and the introduction of " rocks, waters, woods," and of the 
hellish artillery of earth, are the simple play of the poet's 
imagination over a scene which can only in this way be 
brought within the compass of his song. But in grave, and 
inspired, and literal narrative, a combination of nations in the 
flesh raising war against the glorified children of light is too 
monstrous to be thought of. Taking the record then, in its 
necessary significance, we learn that the tide of human life 
has flowed on during these millennial years just as before. 
The church victorious, peaceful, triumphant, has held every- 
where substantial sway, and has brought largely to the popu- 
lation of the earth, both in number and quality, the fruits of 
righteousness. Mark the effect of this on the relation of the 
two resurrections. Even giving to the thousand years' period 



AN INDEFINITE PERIOD. 99 

its utmost restriction, the believers of this long period must, 
it should seem, far outnumber those of all preceding ages. 
One continuous reign of righteousness for a thousand years 
will swell the children of righteousness into countless myriads ; 
and if, as seems to me nearly certain, this thousand years 
stands for an indefinite but greatly prolonged period, the first 
resurrection, even if it embrace all the then righteous dead, 
will reap but a handful compared with those who shall swell 
the sacred harvest of the final resurrection. And if only the 
martyrs shall be thus signally honored, the first resurrection 
will be, beside the later and universal one, almost like that 
of the few saints who thrilled into life beneath the sympa- 
thetic throb of the crucifixion when even the Lord's death 
attested his life-giving power. 

If there were any such exceptional and premillennial 
resurrection, it might be, one should suppose, something like 
this — a sort of inkling of the good things to come — a first- 
fruits, marking some great crisis in the church's history, of 
the coming harvest of life — a mere advance guard to the 
myriad hosts of light, who, when the trumpet shall sound and 
the Lord shall descend from heaven with a mighty shout, 
shall spring at the call into light and glory, and, sweeping 
around their Lord enthroned in mid-heaven, shall fill the con- 
cave of the skies with the shining sons of immortality. That 
will be the resurrection, and so far as any evidence appears, 
the only future resurrection ; marking the moment when 
time shall be lost in the eternal ages, and Satan and his 
finally subjugated hosts shall no longer dream of even a tem- 
porary triumph over the kingdom of the Son of God. 

Whatever difficulties then may be found in such passages 
as " the resurrection from the dead," to which the apostle 



100 THE MILLENNIUM OF THE APOCALYPSE. 

aspires (Phil. 3 : 2), we must look for their solution elsewhere 
than to this " living " of the saints in ch. 20. For, taking it 
never so literally, it does not divide the two resurrections dis- 
tinctively into those of righteous aud wicked. It confines the 
first resurrection, indeed, to the righteous, but it reserves im- 
mensely the larger number of these to the second and final 
one. The first can, of necessity, include only those who were 
dead at the opening of the millennium, while the myriad be- 
lievers of the millennial era are reserved for the second. 1 
And this is confirmed by the account of the judgment in ch. 
20. Here all the dead, small and great, stand before God ; 
earth, sea, and hades have given up their respective dead ; 
the books are opened, including the Book of Life, and the 
distinctions of character and destiny are then determined ac- 
cording to the disclosures of the Book of Life. All this be- 
comes utterly unintelligible, if, more than a thousand years 
before, the righteous dead have been raised, and sealed, and 
glorified, leaving only the enemies of God for this final rising 
and judgment. What a mockery to speak of the books being 
then opened, and the Book of Life opened to determine their 
destiny, and as many as are not found written in the Book of 
Life being thrown into the lake of fire ! Why, according to 
the double resurrection theory, none are now found registered 
in this Book of Life ! All shall be thrown into the lake of 
fire! The discriminating judgment was past more than a 
thousand years ago, and since that epoch, nothing has oc- 
curred to change the destinies of a single member of the race ! 
And if that first was a real, literal resurrection of the be- 

1 Unless, indeed, as some have maintained, the millennial era is one long con- 
tinuous resurrection period, in which every new-born or newly dying saint is im- 
mediately and gloriously transfigured, a fancy which, as it has no hint in its favor 
in the text, does not need a word of refutation. 



AN APPAEENT DISTINCTION. 101 

lievers, how limited, apparently, the circle from which it was 
drawn ! Now, for this final day of doom, earth and sea, death 
and hades render up their dead. Are there no righteous in 
all their precincts ? Or rather does not the universality of the 
language, as well as the final opening of the books — the Book 
of Life among and above the others — indicate that this is in- 
deed a universal, as well as a final, gathering of the race ? 

The apparent distinction of the two resurrections then, in 
one or two passages of the New Testament, has been, I think, 
rightly referred to a distinction not of time, but of character. 
The " better resurrection " of Heb. 11 : 35, is the resurrection 
of a better destiny, a resurrection to life rather than to judg- 
ment. And so with Paul, the " resurrection from the dead " 
which he coveted, may be the resurrection which separates 
him from the children of death, though occurring at the same 
time with theirs. Nor is it unlikely that, though \f^ nging 
to the same epoch, the two classes may be slightly separated 
even in time. The one may spring forward in eager response 
to the celestial summons ; the other may lag behind with a 
fruitless longing for the shelter of the rocks and mountains. 
In all this, I am aware how utterly our human conceptions 
must fail to comprehend the resurrection. Yet, in reasoning 
upon it, I do not see how we can disregard the imagery of 
the Bible. 1 

1 1 beg to add a word or two on the side issues of the question for those who 
find our view unduly delaying the second coming. They will remember that 
delay is no unwonted feature in the kingdom of God, and that the Apostle Peter 
makes very large provision for it ; that the early Christians would have been ut- 
terly incredulous at a hint that the lapse of nearly two thousand years would leave 
the Lord's coming apparently as remote as ever; that our view gives the larger 
scope for testing the power of the gospel and for honoring that Spirit who was 
promised as the all-sufficient guide of the church, and whose presence was to more 
than compensate the personal absence of the Lord ; that it is in time a difference 



102 THE MILLENNIUM OF THE APOCALYPSE. 

In discussing the subject, I have made no attempt at com- 
pleteness. My essay has confined itself almost wholly to the 
Apocalypse, and in this I leave unmentioned the innumerable 
shades of premillennarian opinion and conjecture. And if I 
have dwelt at seemingly undue length on those features of 
the book which I have had occasion to consider, it has not 
been without a purpose. My hope has been, in bringing into 
connection with certain earlier and later chapters, to shed a 
little light for some of my readers on the structure of the 
book itself. I have wished to remind them how chapters 4 
and 5 prepare for the coming drama ; how chapter 6 opens 
the action, wrapping up in itself a prophecy of all that is to 
follow, and from chapter 19 to the close, the denouement of 
the action, the prophecy's last stages of fulfillment. With 
this, a not inconsiderable portion of the book becomes mea- 
surably clear. Looking at the twelve intermediate chapters, 
the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth, difficult 
in some of their details, are clear in their general purport, un- 
folding that judgment on Rome, the representative of the 
secular persecuting power, which culminates in chapter 18, 
and brings indirectly the final triumph. The eight chapters 
then, between the sixth and fifteenth, remain as containing 
most of the, as yet, unloosed knots of this mysterious book. 
In these, also, some of the chapters are not especially diffi- 
cult ; and their general scope, as pointing to the overthrow 
of persecuting Judaism, is generally conceded. With, then, 
so much of the Revelation clear in plan, and not undeciphera- 
ble in its symbolism ; with so much over which purpose and 

of at most only a few thousand years ; that what is promised is certain, and that 
which is certain is always near; and that when, beyond the millennium and all 
the earthly triumphs of the church, the Lord shall come, he will come in un- 
imagined glory, and will come to stay. 



A REASONABLE HOPE. 103 

method have evidently presided, it seems not unreasonable to 
hope that a satisfactory light will yet break upon the rest ; 
that one by one the enigmas will be solved ; and a significance 
will be found pervading the whole book worthy of the un- 
questioned grandeur of some of its parts. Coleridge some- 
where says that he will not assume to understand a writer's 
ignorance, so long as he remains ignorant of his understand- 
ing. In a reversed method, though somewhat analogous 
spirit, we may refrain from sitting in judgment on the refrac- 
tory enigmas of the Apocalypse, while so much in it chal- 
lenges our admiration at once for its clearness and sublimity. 
Its three opening chapters come surely from no unanointed 
pen. The two next ones, so luminous and so sublime, can be 
ushering us into no Babel of unintelligible discords. And 
the four closing ones, following those scenes of lurid wrath 
and confusion with a solemn calm, as if "Jerusalem the 
Golden " had brought down into the bosom of earth's distrac- 
tions the very glories of the skies, cannot be issuing out of an 
unordered and undirected chaos. The sublime significance 
of the part guarantees a like significance of the rest, as 
deeper human researches, or the breath of Providence, shall 
pierce or lift the veil. Socrates, in returning a volume of 
Heraclitus, the philosopher, — known in antiquity as " the ob- 
scure "-—being asked his opinion of it, replied : " What I 
understand is excellent, and I think also what I do not 
understand. But the book requires an expert navigator." 
So the intelligent student of the Apocalypse can scarcely fail 
of the conviction that where so much bears clearly the di- 
vine impress, the rest will prove itself of corresponding 
quality. In character and position, the book is wonderfully 
unique. Bearing the name of the favored apostle, who twice 



104 THE MILLENNIUM OF THE APOCALYPSE. 

received the Lord's intimation that he should in life be wit- 
ness to the glory of the second coming ; sustained in this 
claim of authorship by nearly uniform early testimony ; and 
having such striking Johannean traits, that the skeptical, but 
acute Baur called the fourth Gospel " a spiritualized Apoca- 
lypse," it closes with marvelous grandeur and dignity the in- 
spired canon. At its head stands in majestic symbolism the 
Lord of the church, uttering to her his words of admonition, 
of approval, and of promise ; its progress exhibits, amid the 
thunders of physical and moral convulsion, the heavenly 
kingdom advancing to its consummation ; its close winds up 
the long and stirring conflict with the glorious triumph of the 
church, and a Sabbath peace falling on the distracted world. 
And then comes down out of heaven the New Jerusalem, 
gathering within her wall, glories undreamed of by the fond- 
est visions that clustered around the earthly city of 
David, and, with her river and tree of life, transforming the 
paradise of Eden into the paradise of God. If all this is the 
dream of an enthusiast, or the fabrication of an impostor, then 
surely never, before or since, has enthusiasm dreamed with 
so divine a method, or imposture counterfeited so cunningly 
the genuine signature of inspiration. 



VI. 

THE RENDERING OF 'TPAtH." 

2 Tim. 3 : 16. 

THE INDEPENDENT, of recent date, contained an 
article, discussing the construction of this passage, ren- 
dered in the Common Version : " All Scripture is given by 
inspiration of God, and is profitable," etc. ; but which the 
Revised Verson gives : " Every Scripture inspired of God, is 
also profitable," etc. The difference is very considerable. 
The one rendering simply declares that whatever writing is 
divinely inspired is profitable for Christian training and dis- 
cipline without indorsing the claims of any particular writ- 
ings. The other — that of our received version— declares this 
and much more. It indicates what the specific writings are 
that receive this high eulogium. It gives the apostle's formal 
testimony to the divine origin of the collective body of the 
Old Testament Scriptures, and their consequent usefulness and 
efficiency for Christian discipline. The latter, certainly, has 
the loftier and wider scope ; and as the aged Paul's assertion 
at the close of his career, and as it were in articulo mortis, of 
the divinity and transcendent value of the Old Testament 
Scriptures as a solemn confession of faith to his beloved 
Timothy, and through him to the church of all times, it has 
an interest far transcending that of the rendering of the Re- 
visers. Yet this latter rendering is by no means restricted to 
the Revision. It is endorsed by Alford, Ellicott, Huther, and 
other eminent scholars, though not without marginal and 

105 



106 THE RENDERING OF " rPA*H." 

other indications of doubt of its correctness. The case, then, 
stands sub judice, though perhaps with the argument leaning in 
our modern scholarship to the side of the Revisers. It may 
interest us then to inquire how the evidence really stands ; 
whether it gravitates violently toward either side, or is so 
evenly balanced as to furnish no satisfactory ground of de- 
cision. 

The author of the afore-mentioned article makes an essay 
toward a settling of the question. In examining the writings 
of the apostle he finds so large a number of "pairs of adjec- 
tives " united by the copula, analogously to the construction 
of one passage as to form a sort of habit of style, which jus- 
tifies a conclusion favorable to that construction ; and from 
this he argues for the received rendering. The argument 
is interesting ; but it has the drawback that the examples 
adduced belong really to such familiar usages of the Greek 
language, and could not go far to prove a construction 
which on any other ground is open to objection. Among the 
passages cited there is scarcely one that could really sug- 
gest a doubt, or in which a different construction would even 
be deemed possible, or certainly at all probable. 

Suppose we turn to another element in the passage, the use 
of the word "Scripture" (jpa^rj) in the New Testament 
writings, and on whose meaning here the question largely 
hinges. According to the one rendering, ypa4>7J has here the 
general meaning of " writing " — our " Scripture " in its secu- 
lar sense — and is determined to a sacred meaning only by the 
epithet " inspired of God " (ftednveuGToc) attributively attached 
to it — " every Scripture which is inspired of God " — " every 
divinely inspired Scripture." According to the other, the 
substantive (jpa<pyj) carries in itse^ its sacred meaning ; the 



THE CURRENT OF USAGE. 107 

idea of divinity and inspiration inheres in it ; and the epithet 
dzonvsuGToq (inspired of God), is added predicatively simply 
to explicate and emphasize, for a special purpose, the quality 
already contained in it. 

Which now of these two senses has the sanction of New 
Testament and Pauline usage ? This it should seem ought to 
count in settling the meaning here. The word ypa^rj, whether 
in its singular or plural form, is used fifty-one times in the 
New Testament — fourteen times by Paul. In all of these, 
without a single exception, — unless the present passage be one, 
— the word has the sacred and not the secular signification. 
In every instance it refers specifically to the Jewish Scriptures 
as an inspired and divinely authoritative writing. So uniform 
is this usage that we may assume that in the one or two 
instances in which the epithet "holy" or " sacred" (hpd) is 
added (as Rom. 1 : 2), it is appended merely for emphasis, 
and not to fix an otherwise uncertain or general meaning. 
"As the Scripture saith," "not knowing the Scriptures," 
" according to the Scriptures " ; such are the terms of 
unquestionable import that stud the pages of the New Testa- 
ment. 

This overwhelming current of usage should be decisive of 
our passage, and decisive for the received rendering unless 
some very strong objection can be urged against it. No such 
objection has been, nor, I think, can be urged against it. In 
the preceding verse, indeed, ypd/x/j.ara (writings), is used in a 
general sense and specialized by the adjective ; but the fact 
that the apostle changes the noun in the next verse, argues 
for a change of meaning. 

Nor can an inference unfavorable to our rendering be 
drawn from the omission of the article, by which " all Script- 



108 THE RENDERING OF "rPA*H." 

ure " becomes or may become " every Scripture." If this is 
the better rendering, it simply makes the Scripture to be 
conceived not as a collective totality, but in its individual 
elements; but none the less is the reference to the whole 
Scripture; and passages like Gal. 3:8; 4:3; 2 Peter 1 : 
20, abundantly justify our rendering here "all Scripture." 
That such is the proper rendering I have little doubt, nor can 
I conceive that any grammatical objection can be brought 
against the received rendering. There is no reason why the 
"inspired of God" (fteomeiHTToq) should be connected with 
Scripture (rw0 attributively rather than predicatively, and 
the sentence both in Greek and English is more smooth and 
flowing. 

On the whole, this seems to me a case in which " Revision " 
has not revised wisely ; in which it has given a meaning to 
the passage in no way required by its grammatical construc- 
tion ; in which it has given to the leading noun (rpa<prj) a 
meaning contrary to the otherwise absolutely exceptionless 
usage of the New Testament, and which restricts it to the 
narrower statement of the disciplinary value of whatever may 
be an inspired utterance of God, instead of leaving it on 
that commanding eminence on which it stands as the aged 
apostle's final and formal testimony to the divine authority 
of that collective body of Old Testament Scripture in whose 
faith the apostle lived, and which was to be the church's 
heritage for all time. 



VII. 

THE SELF-EVIDENCING CHARACTER OF THE 
BIBLE. 

IT was not, it may be presumed, after spending some hours 
in the diligent perusal of Plato, or of Cicero, that the 
Roman prince exclaimed, " I have lost a day ! " It was far 
more probably after a day spent in ministering to the frenzied 
brutality of the populace in the games of the circus and the 
amphitheatre. From the reading of the great masters of wis- 
dom and virtue, he would feel that he had drawn nourishment 
for his spiritual nature, matter for profitable reflection, and 
strength and aid for the culture and practice of those virtues 
which he, although a heathen, doubtless felt to be the crown- 
ing excellence of man. How much more, then, should the 
Christian feel that he is profitably and appropriately engaged, 
when evolving with all care and diligence the treasures of 
heavenly wisdom contained in the word of God, and laying 
up in his soul these riches of his spiritual inheritance ! It is 
by the truths of the divine word that he is to expand and 
strengthen his intellect ; it is these which he is to convert into 
principles, that are to form the substratum and basis of 
his character ; that are to purify his heart and regulate his 
conduct. 

There is no book like the Bible. He will say so with the 
deepest emphasis who has penetrated most deeply into its 
hidden stores of wisdom, and who has availed himself the most 
K 109 



110 SELF- EVIDENCING CHARACTER OF BIBLE. 

largely and thoroughly of its teachings, for all his spiritual 
exigencies. To him it comes with ever-increasing freshness, 
and ever-augmenting glory. From brief but pregnant pas- 
sages are ever flashing forth new gleams of brightness. From 
some unnoticed corner are ever welling up new founts of in- 
spiration. The Bible commends itself to our reason as worthy 
of a God — the only book that has ever appeared on earth, 
which could for a moment make good its pretensions to be 
divine. Dr. Chalmers, in his argument for the divine origin 
of Christianity — written, we believe, while he yet knew little 
of experimental religion, — sets aside the internal argument, 
on the ground that we are incompetent to decide in advance 
what the word of God ought to be, and that to pretend to sit 
in judgment on this point is presumption. He therefore con- 
fines himself to the external argument, some of whose points 
he urges with characteristic fullness and power. But in so 
judging, Dr. Chalmers' proceeding is manifestly erroneous. 
He in fact surrenders to the enemy the very stronghold of 
the Christian evidence. He overlooks the higher and nobler 
portions of human nature; he forgets that if man is endowed 
with reason by which to judge the validity of the outward 
evidences of Christianity, he is none the less endowed with a 
spiritual sense, which takes cognizance of its internal and 
moral character. Each of these faculties is absolute and 
supreme in its own department ; and if they are not co-equal 
and co-ordinate, most assuredly the moral element does not 
take rank below the purely rational. It is hence just as im- 
possible for us to receive as divine a book which outrages our 
moral convictions, as one which our intelligence declares to 
be unsustained by outward testimony. The argument from 
the internal character of revelation is, scientifically considered, 



A STRONG POINT. Ill 

just as legitimate as that from its historical and outward at- 
testations, and immeasurably higher and more decisive in its 
character — just so much higher as man's moral nature, by 
universal consent, transcends his intellectual. 

Here, in fact, is the strong point of the Christian evidence. 
On this foundation we might rest the weight of an all-sufficient 
argument for the inspiration of the Scriptures. We might 
say to the infidel geologist, " Prove, if you will and can, that 
the earth has had an existence millions of ages beyond the 
date fixed by the Mosaic records" ; to the infidel ethnologist : 
" Prove, if you can, that the Scripture account of the origin 
of the human race from a single pair is a mistake " ; to the 
infidel philologist : " Prove, if you are able, that this or that 
passage on which we rely in proof of some cardinal doctrine, is 
interpolated and spurious." We are not careful to answer 
you in this matter. You yourselves will anticipate and render 
unnecessary our attempts at refutation. God has made you 
with a conscience — with a capacity to perceive the morally 
arood and beautiful and true, and subjected your reason to the 
power of this faculty. He has made it a part of the indestruct- 
ible essence of the soul. Prove, then, that the Bible is, his- 
torically and scientifically considered, a blunder or a falsehood, 
and you create the most absolutely unsolvable problem in the 
universe. You array the purely rational against the still higher 
moral elements of your nature, in a hostility that knows no 
terms of adjustment. You present the monstrous anomaly of 
a vast scheme of doctrine so out of harmony with the outlying 
world of mind and matter, that the understanding cannot re- 
ceive it, and yet internally so absolutely excellent, so marvel- 
ously coherent, so transcendently glorious, that the conscience 
cannot reject it. We take the Bible in the naked simplicity 



112 SELF-EVIDENCING CHARACTER OF BIBLE. 

and power of its spiritual teachings, in the majesty- of the 
God whom it reveals, in the purity and coherency of the 
morality it inculcates, and we press it home to your reason. 
We lay it on your conscience. We summon a response from 
the deepest and holiest sanctuary of your being to its claims 
to divinity. We defy you to disbelieve it. You cannot do it 
until you can deny yourselves, and eliminate and rend away 
from your spiritual being the conscience which is its crowning 
glory. The utterance of your moral nature is far more quick, 
direct, and decisive, than that of your purely intellectual. It 
will speak with a clearness and an authority that will reduce 
the complicated and doubtful conclusions of science to a 
nullity. You may be an infidel in heart, you may be an 
infidel in your reasonings ; but in your conscience and your 
reason you cannot be. These nobler elements of your being, 
faithful to the Gopl who implanted them within you, the sleep- 
less guardians of his sanctuary in the human bosom, will 
speak within you, and compel you in some honest moments to 
acknowledge your faith in the Bible and its God. 

But the Bible is to be studied. It is a difficult book ; 
simple and clear enough, indeed, in its great outline of spirit- 
ual truth, but obscure and difficult in many of its details. It 
consists of the productions of a long series of writers, scattered 
through a long series of ages, and of the utmost diversity of 
personal character, culture, and condition. It deals in local 
incidents and allusions, and with usages and customs widely 
different from our own. From the nature of the case, it de- 
mands study, and study with all the helps for the elucidation 
of obscure points in archaeology, history, and language, which 
can be procured. It will also repay study ; and frequently 
a close inquiry will evolve results illustrating some obscure 



THE CASE ILLUSTRATED. 113 

passage in a manner equally surprising and beautiful. Espe- 
cially should the Bible be studied by comparison with itself. 
Itself should be made, as far as possible, its own commentator. 
Even with the most imperfect translation, they who in prayer- 
ful reliance on Divine aid, thus diligently explore its passages, 
and bring the light of one fact to shine upon another, will 
often have occasion for gratitude and delight at their progress 
in spiritual knowledge. 

Let me take a simple case illustrating my meaning. The 
student of Scripture has before him the beautiful passage of the 
23d Psalm, " Though I walk through the valley of the shadow 
of death, I will fear no evil," etc., and he naturally inquires 
after its precise meaning. Does " the valley of the shadow 
of death " here denote death itself, as often, perhaps, com- 
monly understood, or does it not ? Looking at the context, 
he observes that he is conducted through the valley by the 
rod and staff of the shepherd, images which would not per- 
haps naturally apply to the state of dying. But he looks 
elsewhere — Job 28 : 3, " The stones of darkness, and the 
shadow of death." Likewise 34 : 22, " There is no darkness 
nor shadow of death, where the workers of iniquity may hide 
themselves." Isaiah 9 : 2 (quoted by Matt. 4 : 16), " The 
people that walked in darkness have seen a great light ; they 
that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath 
the light shined." The inquirer would perhaps need ex- 
amine no farther to satisfy him that the " shadow of death " 
was in Hebrew idiom simply a strong and emphatic expres- 
sion for darkness, like our death-shade. In Job, man searches 
out " the stones of darkness and the shadow of death," i. e., 
the precious stones concealed in the deepest darkness — amid 
darkness and death-shade. " There is no darkness nor shadow 



114 SELF-EVIDENCING CHARACTER OP BIBLE. 

of death," i. e., there is no darkness nor death-shade — no 
darkness deep as the shades of death, or the night of the 
tomb, in which the workers, etc. In Isaiah, " they that dwell 
in the land of the shadow of death," is simply an emphatic 
parallel of " the people that walked in darkness." Having 
thus settled the meaning of the " shadow of death," we have 
no difficulty in applying it to the case before us. The imagery 
is appropriate and beautiful. The Lord is my shepherd. He 
leadeth me into green pastures, and beside still waters. Yea, 
though I pass through valleys overhung with deepest darkness 
and death-shade — the heaviest night of affliction and sorrow 
—his rod and staff will guide, etc. This is a simple case, but 
the principle is of indefinite application. 

I have said that the internal argument for the truth and 
divinity of the Scriptures is legitimate and incontestible ; 
that it appeals as directly and convincingly to our moral 
faculties, to our higher reason, as does the external, or his- 
torical argument to our lower understanding. Hence the 
only effects of discrediting the outward fences or supports of 
revelation, is to array one part of our nature irreconcil- 
ably against another, and to create a problem as obstinately 
unsolvable, as if we had before us a figure which mathemat- 
ical calculation proved to be round, and mechanical measure- 
ment proved to be square. But we leave this ground, and 
descend to a lower level. We throw out of the account the 
internal evidence of the Bible — the claims based on its 
transcendent spirituality and excellence — and in the historical 
argument we place the skeptic in a like dilemma as be- 
fore. We affirm that here, no evidence, incidental or col- 
lateral, can be raised against the Bible, so strong as that 
which its history establishes in its favor. Assume that you 



AX UXSOLVABLE PROBLEM. 115 

have demonstrated the Mosaic account of creation to be a 
myth ; that from the opened sepulchres of Egypt and the 
exhumed cities of Mesopotamia, a voice has issued falsifying 
the Old Testament history ; that, finally, the miraculous history 
of Jesus Christ is a congeries of fables. Your work is done. 
The venerable structure of revelation is demolished, and lies 
before us a shapeless and melancholy ruin. But no, your 
work is not done ; you have another problem to solve, more 
stubborn than any that has yet tasked your faculties; a 
problem all the more difficult in proportion tu the complete- 
ness of your solution of the other. This mass of falsehood 
and fable — the lying forgeries of knavery or fanaticism — 
you have got to explain how it is that it has filled so large a 
place in the world's history, and acted with so mighty an 
influence on the world's destiny. From the days of Jesus 
Christ to the present, literature and history have been filled 
with his name. Kings have owned allegiance to it ; nations 
have been swayed by it; philosophers, statesmen, divines 
have rendered it their homage. As his advent becomes the 
central point of the world's chronology, so also of the world's 
political and moral history. The grand political and moral 
questions of each age have hinged upon the New Testament 
writings. The discourses of the Saviour have been the text, 
on which the great body of literature has been directly or 
indirectly a commentary. 

It is in vain to point us to systems of polytheism, ancient 
or modern, or to Mohammedanism, as presenting parallel 
features. Greek and Roman polytheism presents but one 
point analogous to Christianity, and that is simply the power 
of the religious principle over the human mind. But its 
strength lay in popular superstition, and by the philosopher 



116 SELF-EVIDENCING CHARACTER OF BIBLE. 

and the reflecting, its huge masses of fable were regarded 
with contempt. Modern polytheism enslaves and crushes its 
victims, and is looked upon by universal Christendom with 
contempt or pity. Mohammedanism, since its first fiery im- 
pulses were exhausted, has proved itself impotent to deal with 
the nobler elements of our nature. The mind of Islam has 
withered beneath its sway, and there is scarcely an intelligent 
writer in Christendom who would waste three pages in either 
proving or disproving its claims. Not so with the Bible. 
It has furnished the battle-cry to the intellectual and moral 
heroes of the world. It has been in the thick of the fight — 
itself the mightiest champion of all — where questions were 
agitated which stirred the deepest heart of humanity. It has 
linked itself with all the great problems of social reform 
and philosophical speculation, and lifted them into an import- 
ance which else they never could have claimed. Gigantic 
systems of organized corruption have reared themselves upon 
it, and sought to crush it. Subtle and elaborate theories of 
speculative error have twined themselves about it, and sought 
to throttle it. But from one and the other, like Milton's 
angels throwing off the weight of superincumbent mountains, 
it has worked itself free, and reappeared with undimmed 
purity and undecayed vigor. It has come up on the rising 
tide, it has swept onward with the swelling wave of the world's 
civilization. Nay, itself has demonstrably been the deepest 
well-head, and furnished the most powerful momentum of 
that stream. It has proved its capacity to bear the shock of 
the collision of the mightiest forces of humanity ; to live 
where great principles are discussed ; to stand where the foun- 
dations of States and systems are being settled or upheaved. 
Like the war-horse exulting in the thunder of the battle, so 



THE POSITION RESTATED. 117 

the Bible is in its element amid the loftiest demonstrations of 
intellect, and the sternest strifes of intellectual and moral 
warfare. 

Recall our position. We are not arguing for the truth of 
Christianity. We are not even demonstrating its probable 
future triumph from its past history. We are simply pre- 
senting it as a power in the world which the skeptic has to 
account for. We present the actual influence of the Bible on 
the history of the race, as a problem for solution by the man 
who fancies that he has scientific or other grounds for rejecting 
it. A stream, it is said, does not rise higher than its fountain. 
At all events, we look for some sort of proportion between a 
phenomenon and its cause. Shadows do not overturn empires. 
Phantoms do not wrestle with and overmatch brawny-armed 
and mail-clad heroes. When we see the deeds of a Hercules, 
we take it for granted that a Hercules is somewhere at the 
bottom of them. When the words " Mene Tekel" trace in 
flaming and fearful characters a monarch's doom on his 
palace wall, we know that back of the hand that writes there 
is an intelligence and a will. The traveler in Europe meets 
here and there a class of remains of antiquity which makes 
upon him a powerful and gradually deepening impression. 
Now in Britain, he meets the solid masonry of a Koman wall. 
Now in the heart of Paris, he sees structures which remind 
him of the days when this gorgeous capital was a humble 
appanage of Kome. In Southern France, he stumbles per- 
petually on temples, amphitheatres, and aqueducts, which tell 
him how splendid must have been the empire of which this 
was but a remote and subordinate province. He traverses 
roads which were constructed for the march of Roman 
armies. He looks upon baths which ministered to the 



118 SELF- EVIDENCING CHARACTER OF BIBLE. 

luxury of Roman prsetors. And thus he goes on, step by- 
step, building up in his imagination the colossal fabric of 
Roman power ; reconstructing with the sorcery of moral com- 
parative anatomy, these scattered bones of empire into one 
colossal, gigantic, terrible form, whose legs bestrode the world, 
and whose iron arm dashed into pieces every obstacle to its 
progress. With unutterable awe he approaches the banks 
of the Tiber, where was the source of all this power; where 
she sat enthroned on her seven hills whose nod made the world 
tremble, and whose legions bore her dominion to the banks 
of the Thames, the Danube, the Euphrates, and the Nile. 
And now, suppose any one should start up and tell you that 
not only Romulus and Remus, but Rome itself was a myth ! 
There was no central power for all these remote and mighty 
effects! There was, indeed, a place called Rome, but 
only an inconsiderable village which her partial inhabitants 
fabled and lied into greatness! Absolutely, the statement 
would not be so absurd as that which, in view of what the 
Bible has done, denies the indwelling power, and of course 
the divinity, of its origin. A stream rolling a resistless vol- 
ume over the world, with no fountain ! The most stupendous 
effects, and no cause ! A set of spurious documents, origi- 
nated by knaves and transmitted by dupes, taking possession 
of the intelligence of mankind : fostering it, advancing it, 
and advancing with it, to universal intellectual and moral 
supremacy! Assuredly, this is a miracle greater than all 
the miracles of the Bible; for it is a miracle without a 
God to work it. And that the Bible is so advancing, is 
patent to observation. It is neither sinking exhausted by its 
previous achievements, nor discredited by the growing intel- 
ligence of the age. Germany is returning slowly from its 



SCIENCE AND REVELATION. 119 

dark and disastrous course of rampant unbelief. The scoff- 
ing atheism of a past age is silent and abashed even in infidel 
France. And in England and America, the great centers of 
intellectual and moral light, the Bible reigns with a con- 
stantly increasing sway. 

We, of course, have no apprehension that the disclosures 
of science will contradict revelation. We only say that it is 
a question to the Christian faith wholly unimportant. The 
Bible has established itself. He who should prove its incon- 
sistency with historical records or scientific teachings, would 
only create the dilemma which we have suggested. He would 
only be proving that nature contradicts herself. Like the 
atheist who hangs the universe upon nothing, so he would 
be showing that the most stupendous phenomena in history 
are without a cause. In the great battle of the world, a 
Knight has appeared, clad in impenetrable armor, and 
wielding resistless weapons. His mightiest adversaries have 
been unhorsed ; the sturdiest lances have been shivered in 
the collision ; hosts have recoiled before him ; and wherever 
he has moved, his form has been a tower of strength to his 
friends, and a terror to his foes. But at length his helmet is 
taken off, his corselet of steel is removed, and where should 
have been a body and a will to deal those stalwart blows, 
and to perform those feats of martial prowess, there is — 
nothing ! 

The Bible is one of the easiest, and one of the most diffi- 
cult of books — at once among the plainest, and the most 
obscure. The faith of the child can grasp its general spirit, 
and its most essential teachings;' the intellect of the man and 
the erudition of the scholar, can scarcely explain its special 
difficulties, or resolve its profounder problems. We remem- 



120 SELF-EVIDENCIXG CHARACTER OF BIBLE. 

ber to have heard it said — in apparent depreciation of the 
scholastic study of the Scripture — that God had expended 
the resources of Omnipotence upon the endeavor to simplify 
his word, and make it level to the universal understanding. 
We cannot think so. We are sure that the study of the 
poets and prophets of the Old Testament — that the following 
of the impetuous and irregular argumentation of Paul — that 
a comparison even of the simple records of the evangelists 
— that a survey, in short, of the thousand verbal obscuri- 
ties and remote historical and antiquarian allusions scattered 
over the Sacred Volume — will satisfy any one that it was not 
the purpose of the author of revelation to release those to 
whom it is addressed from the most diligent study of its 
pages. Kegarded in all its details the Bible is an exceed- 
ingly difficult volume. Few books in the whole compass of 
human literature present so many hard and knotty points to 
be resolved, so many stern problems to grapple with, as the 
Scriptures. 

It is common to attribute the obscurities of the Bible to 
the nature of its subject matter — the mysterious and incom- 
prehensible character of the truths with which it deals. This 
view, has of course a degree of justness. If the world of 
sense teems with inexplicable mysteries ; if the mechanism 
of a flower or a leaf utterly transcends our comprehension ; 
if a survey of our physical frames compels the exclamation, 
" I am fearfully and wonderfully made ! " if the volume of 
nature is all over- written with inscrutable wonders, what 
must be expected of that volume whose high argument is 
God and eternity, and all the grand system of spiritual 
truth ? 

Yet this, after all, but partially explains the matter. The 



THE DIVINE METHOD. 121 

Bible contains numberless difficulties which stand in no nec- 
essary relation to the nature of its subject matter ; difficulties 
growing entirely out of the method which God has seen fit to 
adopt for communicating his truth. This method baffles all 
the preconceived notions of human wisdom. Had man had 
the ordering of the matter, he would have had the truths of 
God sent down from heaven authenticated by God's immedi- 
ate signature, and drawn out in a series of simple, trans- 
parent, unmistakable propositions. They should have come, 
as the Jews required their Messiah to come, with all the out- 
ward showing and majesty of the indwelling divinity. They 
should have come in a form which would have placed them 
at the utmost possible remove from every natural product of 
the human mind. The Bible should have stood in complete 
and grand isolation from every form of merely human litera- 
ture, blazing with the glory of the manifest Godhead, and 
flashing at once and resistlessly upon the soul, all its tran- 
scendently important truths. 

Not such was the wisdom of God. He has adopted a 
widely different mode of making his revelation. He has im- 
bedded its truths in the current forms of human literature. 
He has let them come out as the apparently casual product 
of circumstances. Their utterance connects itself with the 
incidents, ordinary and extraordinary, of individual and na- 
tional life. Thus the divine element blends itself with an ele- 
ment essentially and thoroughly human. History, poetry, 
rhetoric, argumentation, all alternately become the vehicles of 
the Divine communications, with all the obscurities and diffi- 
culties incident to these different forms of composition. And 
religious truth thus depositing itself in the works of numerous 
authors, written amid the successive changes of centuries, and 
L 



122 SELF-EVIDENCING CHAEACTER OF BIBLE. 

each separate production mirroring the peculiar character of 
the time — the whole could not but present matter of laborious 
and protracted study, for clearing up the obscure, and har- 
monizing the apparently discordant. 

But are these difficulties without a manifest object? Can 
we not see good reasons why God should not make the Script- 
ure as plain and simple as human reason would have de- 
manded? Its difficulties of style, its boundless varieties of 
allusiou, its wealth of incidental matter not absolutely essen- 
tial to the single purpose of a revelation, all impart to it a 
genuine human interest, and give scope to the exercise of 
those high powers with which God has endowed us. Nothing 
has been formed in vain, and much less the sublime aspira- 
tions and matchless capacities of the human soul. Over 
against these capacities, God has set a boundless universe, 
everywhere admitting, inviting, and rewarding research. Sup- 
pose the facts of geology, of botany, of astronomy, had all 
been given us classified and arranged, instead of being im- 
bedded in the earth, enshrined in the flowers, and scattered 
in confused and seemingly contradictory phenomena over the 
universe of stars, for the mind to search out, harmonize, classify 
and gradually build up into a glorious system — from what a 
world of pleasurable activity would the mind have been ex- 
cluded ! So had divine truth come to us naked, insulated, 
classified, forcing itself resistlessly upon our perception and 
belief, instead of being picturesquely scattered over the wide 
surface of human history, and arrayed in an external garb of 
human incident and emotion — what a rich field of legitimate 
activity would have been closed to the mind ! In the physi- 
cal world, the search for knowledge is, if possible, even more 
pleasurable than the knowledge itself. How reasonable to 



A '.UNIVERSAL PRINCIPLE. 123 

suppose that the same principle would apply to the moral as 
to the physical creation — to God's revelation in his word, as 
well as to his revelation in his works ! In interpreting its ob- 
scure phraseology, in tracing out its recondite allusions, in 
reconciling its seeming contradictions, in marking the ten 
thousand points at which the Scripture narrative intersects 
the lines of human history, and finally, in evolving its whole 
half-hidden truth, until the mind looks at last upon a system 
radiant with glory, and replete with essential harmony---in all 
this how natural, how worthy an employment for the sublime 
faculties of the human soul ! How reasonable that he who 
has everywhere else made effort the condition of possession 
and of pleasure, should have made it so here ! That intense 
and exciting labor should not be made the condition of our 
mastery over the stores of earthly science, without being, at 
least in an equal degree, essential to our acquisition of hea- 
venly wisdom ! And who that has advanced a little in the 
study of the Scriptures, who has begun to see light penetrating 
its dark places, order emerging frcm what at first seemed 
chaos, and the scattered facts and truths gradually linking 
themselves together, and shedding reciprocal light upon each 
other, does not find it in his heart to bless God even for the 
difficulties of revelation — for giving him this sharpener of the 
appetite for spiritual truth ? Would he wish to devote the 
energies requisite for accumulating perishable wealth, and yet 
will he not wish to task his utmost powers in gathering and 
appropriating the riches of heaven? Does he regard that as 
a gracious provision which makes earnest and assiduous toil 
the parent of all true possession and enjoyment in temporal 
things, and yet would he have this principle dispensed with 
in spiritual things ? All the analogies of nature, all the en- 



124 SELF-EVIDENCING CHARACTER OF BIBLE. 

dowments of the human soul, then, would lead us to expect 
that God would give the same scope for its powers in grasping 
the truths which reach upward to the loftiest heights, and out- 
ward to the remotest circles of truth, as to the apprehension, 
at least, of the lower orders of phenomena. And finally, we 
may add that in the widening circles of science, in the succes- 
sive and once unanticipated revelations which the realm of 
the universe may open, revelation will share, and itself disclose 
heights and depths of mystery and glory, that will put to 
shame our loftiest conceptions both of the already attained, 
and of that still to be disclosed. 



VIII. 

JOHN THE BAPTIST'S MESSAGE TO CHRIST. 

<< A RT thou he that cometh, or do we look for another? " 
XX. (Matt. 11 : 3.) " And blessed is he whosoever shall 
not be stumbled in me " (ver. 6). " Among them that are 
born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the 
Baptist ; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater 
than he" (ver. 11). 

The eleventh of Matthew is signalized by a very remark- 
able deputation from John, the Lord's great forerunner, to 
the Saviour, with a very remarkable question, and followed by 
some extraordinary utterances on the part of him to whom 
the question was addressed. The question seems an abrupt 
and unlooked-for inquiry as to the character and claims of 
the Lord. It was followed by a brief reference to the Lord's 
works as demonstrative of his claims, by a rebuke of the un- 
belief implied in his question ; by a subsequent high eulogium 
pronounced upon the Baptist ; and a declaration that with all 
his superiority to the ancient heroes of the faith, the least in 
the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. 

There first naturally attracts our notice in this series of 
noteworthy utterances, the declaration of John's relative in- 
feriority to the humblest members of the kingdom of heaven. 
To the thorough student of the New Testament, any explana- 
tion of its import may seem scarcely needed ; yet where such 
men as Chrysostom, Augustine, and Luther have erred, fol- 
lowed by many of lesser name, it cannot be superfluous to set 

125 



126 JOHX THE BAPTIST'S MESSAGE TO CHRIST. 

forth clearly its import. And in fact it has seemed to many 
almost a paradox that he who in one breath is represented as 
superior to all the eminent saints and seers of earlier time, 
should in the next be placed below the humblest in the king- 
dom of heaven. The eminent writers named have endeavored 
to solve the difficulty by referring " the least in the kingdom 
of heaven " to Christ himself. This interpretation makes, at 
first view, a plausible sense, but it is fraught with insuper- 
able difficulties, and wholly overlooks the real scope of the 
passage. Both the self-disparagement and the self-exaltation 
of the language, as applied to Christ, are equally out of place. 
The true explanation turns not upon the personal character 
of John, as contrasted with that of any other person or persons, 
but upon his position and office. It places in contrast those who 
preceded, and those who were in " the kingdom of heaven." 
" Verily I say unto you," said the Saviour, '"that many pro- 
phets and kings have desired to see the things which ye see, 
and have not seen them ; and to hear the things which ye 
hear, and have not heard them." They lived in the age of 
types and shadows — in the time of promise, not in that of ful- 
fillment. They saw the promised blessings afar off in dim 
vision ; John saw them near at hand. The flashes of the 
coming glory broke upon his view ; the east was streaked 
with the growing premonitions of the coming day. But John 
too had not " attained." He only enjoyed a Pisgah view of 
the promised kingdom which it was not his privilege to enter. 
Thus, while greater than all his prophetic predecessors, both 
in the clearer light which he enjoyed, and in being not merely 
a prophet, but the messenger, the forerunner of Christ, he 
was still below those who should enjoy the full light and 
privileges of the established kingdom. The kingdom of 



A DIFFICULTY DISPELLED. 127 

Leaven was at Land, was come near — but Lad not actually 
come. JoLn was close upon its boundary, but was not yet in 
it. He opened its portal ; Le pointed and urged otbers into 
it ; but died bimself amid tbe shadows of tLe elder dispensa- 
tion. 

TLe difficulty of tLe passage, tLen, is dispelled by an exact 
understanding of the New Testament meaning of tLe "king- 
dom of Leaven." It is not Leaven as tLe seat of God's glori- 
ous presence, and tLe abode of beatified spirits. It is not even 
God's spiritual kingdom, as set up in tLe Learts of all true 
believers. It was tLe outward organized kingdom, instituted 
at tLe coming of our Lord ; tLe new, far more spiritual econ- 
omy wLicL tLen took tLe place of tLe old. This kingdom 
commenced in its germ witL tLe Saviour's entrance on Lis of- 
ficial work as MessiaL ; but it was not formally and fully inau- 
gurated until tbe descent of tLe Spirit at tLe Pentecost, wLen 
Lis gracious influences distilled like dew upon Lis people, and 
it was no longer a future Deliverer, a coming MessiaL tLat 
was vaguely promised, but tbe incarnate, crucified, risen 
Jesus wLo was preacLed, with redemption in Lis name. On 
tLe transcendent superiority of this newly organized kingdom 
of God, I need not now dwell, nor upon tLe elevation enjoyed 
by the humblest of its members above the most favored of 
patriarchs and prophets, now that the spiritual nature of the 
Messiah's kingdom was fully understood, that the Holy Spirit 
was shed forth in ample measure, revealing to his people the 
things of Jesus, and enlightening them into that mystery 
which so swelled the bosom of Paul — the mystery hidden for 
ages — that the partition wall between Jew and Gentile had 
been thrown down, and the Gentiles were fellow-heirs to the 
unsearchable riches of Christ. There were then three dis- 



128 JOHN THE BAPTIST^ MESSAGE TO CHEIST. 

tinctly marked and progressive stages : (1) That of the ancient 
prophets and holy men, who, in their more darkened age, had 
been distinguished favorites of heaven ; (2) John, who had 
been selected as the immediate harbinger of Christ, and stood 
in dignity, light, and privilege above all his predecessors, be- 
ing not without some intimations of the spiritual character of 
Christ's work, and his own time falling, in a certain sense, 
within the more favored period ; and (3) those who were per- 
mitted to enter into the kingdom of heaven — to witness and 
share in its complete establishment, and in all the glorious 
privileges which it brought with it. John stood in the tran- 
sition period — fully equal, probably superior, to the most 
favored of his predecessors, but nevertheless below even the 
humblest of those who were permitted to witness the fulfill- 
ment of the promises in the glorious establishment of the 
kingdom of God. 

But if John was not strictly in the kingdom of heaven, 
the new dispensation, what shall we say of his baptism? 
Was it Christian baptism? and if not, did the apostles sit 
down to the communion table with their Master, without 
having submitted to Christian baptism ? The answer to the 
question is in a nutshell. John's baptism was not formally, 
and in the fullest sense, Christian baptism — but it was that 
essentially. It was like the mission of John himself, prepara- 
tory and transitional. It looked forward rather than back- 
ward. It was a baptism of repentance with reference to the 
coming Messiah, rather than of faith in the crucified and 
risen Jesus. It contained the core, but not the full develop- 
ment of the Christian ordinance. And finally it was a 
divine ordinance— instituted of God. As such, the apostles 
had beyond a question, like their divine Master, all submitted 



PROPOSED SOLUTIONS. 129 

to it. The} r had been baptized with a baptism which was 
essentially, if not in fall development, the ordinance required 
by Christ ; with a baptism divinely instituted ; with the best 
baptism, and the only baptism that then existed — and all 
who can claim for themselves thus much have, I think, 
a divine warrant to share the ordinances of the Christian 
Church. 

But we have still to answer the question, " What led to 
this deputation of John to Christ ? " All the other state- 
ments of the New Testament indicate John's unbounded con- 
fidence in Jesus as the Messiah, and unquestioning reverence 
for him. He had shrunk reverently from baptizing him, as 
the inferior shrink from the superior ; he had seen the 
heavens open to inaugurate and attest his mission as the Son 
of God. The question was that remarkable one : " Art thou 
he that cometh, or do we look for another ? " 

He had pointed him out as the Lamb of God that taketh 
away the sin of the world, and expressed his joy in him as 
the Principal to whom he was but an accessory. And yet, 
seemingly in the teeth of all this, we have here an abrupt 
and startling inquiry whether he was in truth the Messiah. 
The phenomenon is extraordinary, and justifies earnest 
endeavors for an explanation. 

The solutions proposed are two : one, that the question was 
proposed to meet doubts which had risen in the mind of 
John ; the other, to satisfy John's disciples — to assure them, 
by bringing them into personal contact with the words and 
works of Christ, of his divine mission. This latter theory is 
plausible, but not convincing. John might, indeed, have 
sent his disciples to listen to the discourses and behold the 
works of Jesus, but he would scarcely have authorized them 



130 JOHN THE BAPTIST'S MESSAGE TO CHEIST. 

to address to him an inquiry so blunt, and so seemingly dis- 
respectful. And again, the disciples put their question 
directly in the name of their master, — " John the Baptist 
hath sent us to ask thee " (Luke) — and to John is the reply 
most explicitly and pointedly directed — " Go and tell John 
again." In short, everything about the transaction points to 
John as the person mainly interested, and the supposition 
that it was for the disciples, is improbable and gratuitous. 

But how are we to explain the question as coming from 
John ? I answer : it sprang from his misconception of the 
nature of the Messiah's kingdom. All Israelites expected, 
upon the coming of the Messiah, the setting up of an immedi- 
ate, glorious, temporal kingdom. Even the most spiritual had 
their views alloyed by a large intermixture of secular concep- 
tions. They looked for the immediate breaking of the Roman 
yoke, the redemption of the temporal Israel, and a restoration 
of more than the glorious days of David and Solomon. The 
peace, the prosperity, the splendor which Isaiah had so glow- 
ingly depicted, were then to be the inheritance of the nation. 
Partly, certainly, in this light, we are to interpret the exult- 
ant songs of Mary and Zechariah ; the eager gladness with 
which the multitudes thronged to John's preparatory baptism ; 
the anxiety of Herod to dispatch the destined supplanter of 
his throne; the enthusiastic hosannas of Jerusalem when 
Jesus made his public entry into it. The disciples surely did 
not fall behind even the religious Jews of their age, in the 
spirituality of their conceptions of his reign. Yet their dis- 
putes as to who should be the greater, pointed to a temporal 
kingdom, and the question, " Lord, wilt thou now restore the 
kingdom to Israel ? " — put to him on the way to the Mount 
of Ascension — shows that even the startling phenomena of 



THE POSITION OF JOHN. 131 

his death and resurrection had not been able to dislodge the 
deep-rooted prejudice. Can we doubt, then, that John 
shared the prevalent misconception of his countrymen? 
That when he came declaring that the kingdom of heaven 
was at hand, he had a like expectation of an immediate, 
glorious, outward empire ? 

Are we pointed in reply to the spiritual declarations of 
the harbinger in the fourth Gospel, such as, " Behold the 
Lamb of God," etc. ? To this I answer, that John was a 
prophet, the last prophet of the old dispensation. As such we 
might expect from him prophetic utterances, and that too, clear 
in proportion to his more favored position and the nearness 
of the fulfillment. But we need not suppose any deviation in his 
case from the ordinary law of Old Testament prophecy. He 
did not himself fully understand the import of his own predic- 
tions. The temporary ecstasy is to be distinguished from his 
ordinary and normal state, and the views expressed in the 
one are no criterion of his prevailing conceptions in the other. 
One of the greatest trials with which our Saviour had to con- 
tend to the last in his disciples, was their grovelling and un- 
worthy ideas of his work and kingdom. Was John exalted 
so entirely above them ? 

We are not left, I think, to mere inference. The point is 
decided by the express testimony of the Saviour. He pro- 
nounces in the hearing of the multitude an exalted eulogium 
upon John, declaring that as a prophet, and more than a pro- 
phet, as his own harbinger, he stood fully on a level with the 
most eminent of the earlier saints. Abraham, Moses, David, 
Isaiah, none of these could take rank above John. And yet, 
adds the Saviour, the least in the kingdom of heaven is 
greater than he. This is no personal derogation from the 



132 JOHN THE BAPTIST'S MESSAGE TO CHEIST. 

character of John. It shows the difference of the dispensations 
— the measureless superiority of the new and spiritual over 
the old and more secular economy. I assert what is scarcely 
open to valid questioning, that the kingdom of heaven means 
here the new dispensation which Christ was about to set up, 
and that his language is simply equivalent to saying that the 
humblest subject of it stood in knowledge and privilege above 
the highest of the old. An admirable commentary on the pas- 
sage is Christ's language to his disciples : " Blessed are your 
eyes for they see, and your ears for they hear ; for verily I say 
unto you, that many prophets and kings have desired to see 
the things that ye see, and have not seen them, and to hear 
the things that ye hear, and have not heard them." 

Our Saviour's authoritative declaration then, declares the 
inferiority of John. It puts him among the prophets of the 
past dispensation, the last and greatest of them, indeed, but 
still of them, dwelling amid their shadows, and not emanci- 
pated from that element of earthliness which attended the 
clearest revelations of the old economy. This too is our 
Lord's explanation of the conduct of John, and apology for it. 
He had sent to Christ because he did not understand the nature 
of his kingdom — its thorough spirituality. Hence he was 
vexed with his delay, with his lingering in obscurity, with 
his contenting himself with performing miracles among the 
peasantry of Galilee instead of seating himself on the throne 
of David, and arraying himself with the glories of an earthly 
potentate. He was, in fact, stumbled, offended in Christ. And 
he sent the deputation to remind him how tardy and improper 
was his procedure, how he was failing to meet the expectations 
which greeted the destined Monarch and Redeemer of Israel. 
The question was not one of innocent ignorance seeking infor- 



A DESERVED REBUKE. 133 

mation, but of prejudice, misconception, and presumption, 
which demanded a rebuke. 

And the Lord rebuked him. In language delicate, digni- 
fied, and severe, he referred John to the works of beneficence 
and mercy which he was performing, and then adds gently, 
yet severely, " and blessed is he whosoever shall not be 
offended in me." John had been offended in Christ, and in 
sending this deputation he had shown how the weakness of 
the man and the prejudice of the Jew blended itself with the 
majesty of the prophet and the forerunner. 

Let me beg the reader now to look at the whole carefully in 
connection, and especially to put the passages containing the 
question and answer alongside that containing our Lord's 
comment on John's position. They explain each other. The 
question from John shows what suggested the declaration of 
his inferiority, and this declaration again is a commentary 
upon the question. And as they harmonize with each other, 
so they harmonize with the usual tenor of the New Testament 
passages. 

Let me add two reflections. First, this mission, thus inter- 
preted, adds John to the list of Scripture worthies, whose fail- 
ings, as well as their virtues, inspiration has faithfully revealed. 
Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, all appear with their faults 
more or less grave. Peter, in the next breath after receiving 
an emphatic blessing for his sublime confession of faith, is re- 
buked with severity for his failure to understand the true 
work of the Messiah. And so here the faithful pen of inspi- 
ration has, with its usual apparent unconsciousness, placed the 
record of one blot on the otherwise stainless escutcheon of the 
Baptist. 

Secondly, my subject reminds us of the cause of that viru- 
M 



J 34 

lence and malignity of hate which accompanied the Jewish 
rejection of the Messiah. There was with them not merely the 
working of ordinary human depravity, but the overthrow of 
their long and proudly cherished national hopes. That glori- 
ous kingdom which had been their dream of ages — whose 
coming glory gilded the pages of prophets, and swelled into 
rapture the songs of their bards, was it come to this ? This 
man of Nazareth, this son of a carpenter, whose retinue was 
the halt, the blind, the illiterate, was it in him that all those 
sublime predictions of the future deliverer found their reali- 
zation ? Hence the infuriated rage with which they dragged 
him to the cross, and loaded with execrations and with all 
the ignominy which outraged national pride could heap upon 
him, the impostor who declared that he was the long-looked- 
for Hope of Israel. 



IX. 
JESUS AND THE JEWISH TEMPLE. 

Luke 2 : 41-52; Matthew 17 : 24-27; John 2 : 13-22. 

IThe child Jesus with his parents in the temple at 
• Jerusalem {Luke 2 : 41-52). — The Gospels abound 
in direct and formal assertions of our Lord's divine nature 
and heavenly Sonship ; yet they abound also in those 
slighter hints and seemingly unconscious references which, 
to the thoughtful mind, have as arguments even a more 
decisive force. The direct assertions, the open miracles, 
might easily be the product of fabrication ; the indirect hints 
and casual allusions are generally beyond suspicion ; nothing 
explains them but their genuineness. Of such a character, 
and beautifully illustrative of our Saviour's habitual mode of 
regarding himself, are several of the references in the Gospels 
to his relations to the temple. The temple was pre-eminently 
the house of God. Jerusalem, as the seat of the theocratic 
government, was the city, and the temple was the palace, of 
the Great King. How then would the self-exiled and incar- 
nate Son of God feel and bear himself toward this earthly 
home of his heavenly Father — this earthly palace of the 
heavenly King ? 

The first illustration which I notice occurs in Luke 2 : 41, 
in connection with the only incident which inspiration has 
selected for record from the period between Christ's earliest 

135 



136 JESUS AND THE JEWISH TEMPLE. 

infancy and his baptism. His parents, according to their 
custom, in his thirteenth year went up to Jerusalem to the 
Passover ; and on this occasion, as, we may well presume, on 
every similar subsequent occasion, the child of prophecy and 
miracle accompanied them; Missing their son in returning 
at the close of the feast, they retraced their anxious steps to 
the sacred city. After a weary search they at last, to their 
surprise, found him in the temple, and the yearning heart of 
the mother at once vented itself in an affectionate chiding to 
him for having left them to seek him sorrowing. " Why 
were ye seeking me ?*" was the memorable reply. " Knew 
ye not that I must be at my Father's ? " So I translate, in 
accordance with a majority of the best ancient and modern 
interpreters. The rendering of the common version, " about 
my Father's business," is indeed, grammatically, equally de- 
fensible, but much less intrinsically probable. That the 
child of twelve years should chide his parents for seeking 
him, on the ground that he ought to be engaged in the busi- 
ness of his Father, is scarcely natural, especially when we 
remember that he immediately returned home with them, 
and remained in retirement and subjection until his thirtieth 
year. Besides, the appropriate and modest act and attitude 
of the child, " hearing and asking them questions," would 
scarcely be designated by such language. But that he 
should gently chide them, when they had missed him, for 
looking for him in a long and anxious search, is exceedingly 
natural and beautifully suggestive. " Why spend time in 
seeking for me ? Where should the Son be but in the house 
of his Father ? You should have known at once, where to 
find me. Your feet should have turned instinctively and 
instantly to the temple, where, in Jerusalem, you would as 



ASSERTION OF DIVINE RELATIONSHIP. 137 

naturally look for the Son of the Great King, as at Nazareth, 
in the abode of his human parents." The language, then, is 
no reproof to his parents for seeking to draw him back from 
the business of his heavenly mission to secular relations and 
pursuit ; this, at his tender age, would have been scarcely 
appropriate. Neither was it intended as any formal and 
serious rebuke for their labor in searching for him. It is just 
a passing and delicate intimation to them of his higher rela- 
tions and heavenly Sonship. " Why spend time in seeking 
for me, as if there could be any doubt about where to find 
me? Where should the child be but in the house of his 
Father ? " It is simply a graceful and touching reminder to 
them of his true nature, and of the higher parentage to 
which the earthly relation was entirely subordinate. 

Thus early does the child Jesus assert his divine relation- 
ship ; thus early remind his mother of his high origin and 
destiny. At Nazareth, his parents were Joseph and Mary, 
and their humble house was his home. At Jerusalem, God 
was his Father, and the house of God, the temple, was the 
natural resort for the child. We may well believe that the 
sight and presence of the temple awoke in the child ideas 
and emotions which partially slumbered amid the seclusion 
of the distant Galilean hills, but which now drew him with 
resistless impulse to this so dear and hallowed, though sadly 
desecrated, spot. Here, therefore, he lingered by the right of 
the Son in the house of his Father. The full significance of 
his reply to his mother's affectionate expostulation was of 
course not understood even by herself. The pen of inspira- 
tion has recorded the incident as shedding a most beautiful 
light on the character and history of the sacred child. It is 
but a glimpse, yet a glimpse that opens into the profounder 



138 JESUS AND THE JEWISH TEMPLE. 

recesses of his spiritual life. It shows clearly the deeper than 
human consciousness : the higher than merely human 
relations. 

2. Jesus and the temple tax. — The incident that I 
have just related in illustration of our Lord's relations to 
the temple, occurred within the precincts and under the in- 
spiration of the temple itself. That to which I now call 
attention, was due to no such influences, and shows how his 
conscious relations to the temple and its God followed him 
through his later career. It meets our unexpectant eye at a 
late period in our Lord's earthly life, far away from the 
temple, on the shores of his favorite Gennesaret. As he 
entered Capernaum on one occasion, the collectors of the 
temple tax — the half-shekel, equal to two Attic drachmas, 
which the Jews annually paid to maintain the national 
worship especially in connection with the temple — came to 
Peter and asked him if his Master did not pay the didrachma, 
or temple tax. Peter inconsiderately, but naturally, replied 
that he did. As he entered the house, the Lord, divinely 
cognizant of what had occurred, anticipated the disciple with 
the question, " From whom do the kings of the earth take 
tribute ? From their own children or from strangers " ? (i. e. t 
from aliens, persons outside of their own household.) Peter 
replied, " From strangers." " Then," rejoined Jesus, " are the 
children free." The point of the question and the justness 
of the inference are obvious at a glance. The temple tax was 
a tribute imposed by the heavenly Monarch, to keep up, as it 
were, his royal state ; Jesus is the Son of that King ; by 
universal usage, therefore, he is rightfully exempt from it. 
The kings of the earth do not exact the means of keeping 
up their princely establishments and regal state from their 



THE FREEDOM OF SONSHIP. 139 

own children ; they derive their revenues from sources out- 
side of the royal household. It must be a monstrous anomaly 
for royalty to maintain itself by levying on its own household. 
The sons are free ; and by logical consequence the Son of the 
heavenly King cannot properly be called on to aid in main- 
taining the national worship. The temple is his Father's house 
and palace; the support of its appointments and services 
should be drawn from others rather than the Son. Of course 
the Saviour stated the principle, not from any desire to avail 
himself of it. Having asserted his right of exemption, he 
immediately waives it, and proceeds miraculously to meet the 
demand. His purpose was to instruct Peter ; to drop into 
his mind one of those pregnant hints, which, though imper- 
fectly understood at the time, would furnish matter for in- 
structive reflection. It teaches us too, how habitually and 
really Jesus bore under his human guise, and with all his 
human sympathies, the consciousness of his divine relation. 
The force and beauty of this striking and picturesque little 
incident are nearly lost in the common version, by the un- 
fortunate rendering of a single word. The term didrachma, 
or double drachma, equal to the sacred half-shekel, would 
instantly suggest to the reader of the original the character 
of the tribute in question. The reader of the common ver- 
sion gets no such idea. The general word tribute suggests 
simply a political tax, levied by the Roman government ; 
and, so understood, the incident is without meaning, and the 
brief but beautiful reasoning of our Lord loses all its rele- 
vancy. To that government the special political relations 
of the Lord would be a matter of indifference. The Son 
of David and the humblest peasant would in its eye be 
equally aliens, and equally liable to its exactions. It is as 



140 JESUS AND THE JEWISH TEMPLE. 

temple money, as a tribute demanded by the God of the 
temple and the founder of the national worship, that the 
language becomes beautifully significant and forcible. We 
may add that the incidental and seemingly matter-of-course 
form of the reasoning gives it additional point. Jesus does 
not stop to argue his own relation to the God of the temple : 
that he takes for granted. Starting from his admitted 
premise, he gently reminds Peter of the inconsiderate haste 
with which he had declared the liability of his Master to the 
temple tribute. 

3. Jesus Cleansing the Temple (John 2 : 13-22). I have 
noticed two references in the Gospel narratives to our 
Lord's relations to the temple at Jerusalem. Another and 
still more striking display of this relation is made in the two 
separate but kindred acts of cleansing the temple, recorded, 
the one in John, and the other in the synoptical Gospels. 
Twice in our Lord's ministry — once at its commencement, 
once at its close, and both times in connection with the Pass- 
over — he gave vent to the righteous indignation with which 
the desecration of his and his Father's house had inspired him. 
Business arrangements, made at first for the convenience of 
the temple worshipers, partly in exchanging foreign coins for 
the sacred shekel, partly in procuring sacrificial victims, had 
gradually enlarged their proportions, until, at the time of the 
great feasts especially, the outer courts of the temple were 
filled with the noisy confusion of secular traffic. The sight 
was intolerably painful to the holy eye of the Son. In his 
earlier years, when visiting Jerusalem with his parents, we 
may well suppose that the bosom of the divine child glowed 
with holy indignation at this defilement of the sacred precincts. 
How often had he burned with an eager desire to expel the 



AN EXPELLED TRAFFIC. 141 

unhallowed lust of gain and the usurpations of worldly traffic 
from the place of prayer ! But his hour was not yet come, 
and in resigned obedience he waited until the hour appointed 
by the Father. We often think, with admiratioD, of the ex- 
emplary filial obedience which, during thirty years, the hea- 
venly child rendered to his human parents. A far heavier 
trial, I think, was his patient submission during all these 
years to the will of his Heavenly Father, adjourning so long 
his entrance on the work of Messianic reform to which he 
looked forward. Son of God, as he was, he w r as obliged to 
wait, and did in patience wait, until the time was ripe for the 
opening of his career of physical and spiritual healing. 

Amoug his earliest acts, when that time came, was the 
cleansing of the temple. Visiting Jerusalem at the first Pass- 
over after his baptism, he finds, as doubtless on former occa- 
sions, the sacred precincts defiled by a usurping traffic. He 
hastened to vindicate their violated sanctity. With a scourge, 
the symbol of might, he appears among the traffickers, and 
authoritatively demands their instant withdrawal. Surprise 
and consternation seize them. They wait, probably, for no 
act of outward violence. The majesty of his look, the au- 
thority of his tone, the evident purity and earnestness of his 
zeal, conspire, with their consciousness of guilt, to secure their 
instant obedience. Conscience-smitten and terror-stricken, 
they cower and flee before him, and calm and silence are re- 
stored to the holy precincts. 

On the details of the scene I cannot dwell. The act was, 
in reality, one of the most remarkable in his wonderful life — 
one of the most striking assertions of his Messianic preroga- 
tive. It was in literal and startling fulfillment of the prophecy, 
" The Lord whom ye seek shall suddenly come to his temple.' , 



142 JESTTS AND THE JEWISH TEMPLE. 

He came to his temple, not in, the outward pomp which the 
people expected, but with a sublime spiritual majesty infinitely 
transcending that of any outward pageant. He performed an 
act befitting his character as Messiah — an act that alike 
revealed his personal purity, and told of the righteousness 
that was to characterize his reign. A mere outward pageant 
would have dazzled the world, but would have been essentially 
unmeaning. This was profoundly, impressively significant. 
Cleansing at the outset of his career the temple of God, re- 
storing to it its sanctity as a place of prayer, told, in language 
which the Sermon on the Mount but translated into words, 
the spiritual and holy nature of the kingdom which he was 
about to set up. 

Again, as it marked his Messianic purity it marked his 
Messianic authority. No other Jew would have ventured on 
such an act ; no other, in venturing, but would have ignomin- 
iously failed. The worldliness that had invaded the temple 
was too bold to yield to anything short of manifest divinity, 
especially half-consecrated, as it seemed, by its connection 
w 7 ith the sacred service of the temple. Jesus came with au- 
thority ; he came as the Anointed One of Heaven ; he came 
as the Son of God. He performed the act of cleansing by 
virtue of his high Messianic prerogative. 

Once more : The act strikingly illustrates Christ's special 
relation to the temple, and to the God of the temple. He 
came to the temple as to his Father's house. He felt the 
righteous indignation of a Son over the desecration of his 
Father's dwelling-place. Few human emotions are more 
painful than those with which a son comes to a once cherished, 
but now forsaken and dismantled, abode of his fathers. Few 
feelings of indignation would be more natural and keen than 



A WANTON DEFILEMENT. 143 

those with which the son of a king would see, in a distant 
province of his father's kingdom, the palace which he had 
reared, and where he had planted the insignia of his empire, 
rudely invaded, taken possession of, and wantonly outraged 
by lawless subjects. How sternly would he rebuke them ! 
How promptly chase them from the scene of their usurpations ! 
But very faintly does this typify and illustrate the mingled 
grief and anger with which the incarnate Son of God contem- 
plated the wanton defilement and abuse of his Heavenly Fa- 
ther's earthly dwelling-place. Bad enough to see the earth 
at large reeking with pollution ! Bad enough to see all the 
nations given over to the abominations of idolatry ! Bad 
enough to see the great temple of the universe, as far as the 
wickedness of man could effect it, wrested from its Maker 
and rightful Lord, and converted into a vast shrine for the 
orgies of a false and pestilent worship ! But all too bad that 
the one single spot of earth unprofaned by the rites of hea- 
thenism — the one single sanctuary which, amid the innumer- 
able temples 6f paganism, bore solitary witness to the presence 
of the Living God — that this too should be invaded, if not 
by the formal rites, yet by the essential spirit of idolatry ! 
" Zeal for thine house consumeth me," said one of the ancient 
servants of God ; and his words but anticipated and feebly 
uttered the emotions of the divine Son when, in his transient 
self exile from the courts of the heavenly glory, he looked 
upon the violated sanctity, the outraged majesty of the one 
earthly recognized house and dwelling-place of his Father. 
The cleansing then of the temple, symbolized the purity that 
was to characterize the dominion of the Messiah ; it marked 
his Messianic authority ; and possibly even more than all, it 
told of the zeal of the Son for the honor of his Father. His 



144 JESUS AND THE JEWISH TEMPLE. 

" Father's house " had been converted into " a house of mer- 
chandise," and he hastens to redeem it from the vile uses to 
which it was prostituted. The scene is another of those beau- 
tiful incidental lights which illustrate the relation of Jesus to 
the temple, and to the God of the temple. 

One word on the often-mooted question whether the cleans- 
ing of the temple occurred but ouce in our Lord's ministry. 
One might suppose that a mere reference to the record would 
set it entirely at rest. John records a cleansing as taking 
place at the opening of our Lord's ministry ; the synoptical 
Gospels record one at its close. It is an event which would 
be equally likely to take place twice as once — which would be 
eminently and equally befitting both periods. If, therefore, 
we accept the authority of the sacred historians for the occur- 
rence of the event at all, we cannot doubt that it occurred 
twice ; and the charge of discrepancy, which some critics have 
been so ready to bring against the evangelists, is utterly 
gratuitous. The synoptists omit the mention of its earlier oc- 
currence, as they deal mainly with Christ's ministry in Gali- 
lee. John omits the mention of the later, as he omi:s many 
of the events recorded in the earlier Gospels. 



THREE PARABLES. 

IThe Prodigal Son (Luke 15 : 12-82). In this and the 
• following chapter there are found, in close proximity, 
three striking parables, all founded on the possession and use 
of property. 

The first, that of the "Prodigal Son," shows us a young 
man put in possession of his patrimony, squandering thriftlessly 
his property, reckless of coming need, and reduced to beg- 
gary and impending starvation ; the second shows us a man 
shrewdly and forecastingly turning the property of another to 
his own advantage, so as to secure to himself a home and 
friends against the hour of destitution ; the third shows us a 
man not recklessly squandering, but so selfishly expending 
his own property upon his own gratification, as to fail of 
making to himself friends by means of it in the spiritual 
world. The second parable is evidently suggested by that 
feature in the first in which the son improvidently squanders 
his fortune without making any provision for the evil day ; 
the third is in immediate illustration, by contrast, of the 
injunction of the second, "Make to yourselves friends of 
[from, by means of] the mammon of unrighteousness, that 
when ye fail ye may be received into everlasting habitations." 

The first, that of the "Prodigal Son," is called forth by the 
murmuring of the scribes and Pharisees, the religious aristoc- 
racy of the Jewish people over the hospitable reception given 
by the Saviour to those spiritual aliens of the Jewish State, 
N 145 



146 THREE PARABLES. 

the " publicans and sinners." That he who claimed to be 
the promised and long-expected Deliverer of the nation — the 
Messiah that was to come, the Hope and destined King of 
Israel — should consort with the lowly, should eat with publi- 
cans and sinners, should prefer their society to that of the 
scribes and Pharisees, was ground of serious offense ; was 
enough of itself to discredit his claims to high national 
honors. - 

" Your Master," said they to his disciples, " receiveth sin- 
ners and eateth with them ! " 

Jesus presents one or two brief defenses of his proceeding, 
and then at length sets forth the great principles of his king- 
dom in the beautiful narrative of the thriftless, self-exiled, 
starving, penitent, and forgiven prodigal, whose reception by 
his compassionate father exposes him to reproaches from the 
elder son, such as the scribes and Pharisees visit upon the 
Lord. To defend his course, our Lord utters three suc- 
cessive parables, all tending to the same point, all illus- 
trating the same great principle, the saving of sinners as 
the grand purpose of the gospel. The joy of the shepherd 
over the recovery of the strayed sheep ; the exultation of the 
woman upon finding her lost piece of silver ; the father's fes- 
tive welcome of his profligate but penitent child — all illus- 
trate the joy with which God and angels contemplate the 
spectacle of a reclaimed sinner. And to set the matter 
in the strongest light, our Saviour seizes on that well- 
known principle of our nature which prompts us to rejoice 
with a double joy over that which had been periled and lost, 
for the very reason that it had been in peril. We prize health 
more when we snatch it from the grasp of sickness. We 
attach 'a tenfold value to life when we rescue it from the jaws 



LOSS PREFACING JOY, 147 

of impending death. We rejoice with a deeper and more 
demonstrative exultation over the small good which has been 
seriously endangered, than over the much larger one, in regard 
to which the placid current of our joy has been broken by no 
fearful apprehensions of its loss. And so, says the Saviour, 
in the spiritual world : " There is more conscious and exul- 
tant delight over one soul rescued from the ruins of the 
apostasy, than over multitudes that had never incurred the 
hazard of perdition." " There is joy in heaven over one sinner 
that repenteth more than over ninety and nine just persons 
that need no repentance." This thought forms the key-note 
of the parables. The shepherd rejoices more over the one 
recovered sheep, than over the ninety-nine that had remained 
in the fold ; the woman regards with livelier pleasure the 
single coin recovered to her little store than all the nine 
which she had kept in safety ; and the father greets the return 
of an alien and profligate child with demonstrations of joy, 
such as had never been drawn forth by years of faithful and 
unfaltering service. The picture is perfectly true to nature. 
The sentiment finds its echo and response in the universal 
experience of humanity. On the deepest darkness dawns the 
most welcome day. From the deadliest sorrow springs the 
most exquisite joy. The continued happiness of the unfallen 
is a matter of course — they have never been in peril. But 
the recovery of those who had been given over as sons of 
perdition, awakens a thrill of joy proportionate to the depth 
and fearfulness of their ruin. 

2. The unjust steward (Jjvike 16 : 1-13"). This is the 
second of this triad of parables which, having a certain 
subtle connection with each other have all to do with the 
use and responsibilities of property. This, of the " Unj ust 



148 THREE PARABLES. 

Steward," presents perhaps some of the more difficult prob- 
lems for solution. One of the most disputed points is what 
personage corresponds to the rich man. Olshausen supposes 
him to be the World, and the prince of this world, the 
devil ; Meyer, Mammon, or riches ; Alford, God. Of these, 
Alford is unquestionably nearest the truth ; that is, his view 
involves the least perversion of the natural scope of the 
parable. The true view, however, is undoubtedly that of 
Ebrard and De Wette, who maintain that the rich man does 
not properly and strictly represent either. The parable, like 
that of the " Good Samaritan," and the " Prodigal Son," 
simply seeks to illustrate a principle, and the rich man and his 
steward are merely employed as personages through whom 
the truth may be brought out. Nothing more confuses and 
darkens the parables — nothing more breaks in upon their 
simple unity and mars their beauty, than the attempt to 
fasten an undue significance upon their several parts, and to 
find a separate and independent doctrine in what is manifestly 
the mere drapery of the parable, the outward imagery essen- 
tial to its parabolic character. 

The grand purpose of the parable is to illustrate the neces- 
sity of spiritual prudence in so using the goods of the present 
life, as to secure to ourselves spiritual treasures, "the true 
riches," an inheritance of the soul, when our earthly heritage 
shall have passed away. This is done by showing the fore- 
cast with which an earthly steward provides for the coming 
exigencies of the present life. It will be readily seen, then, 
why the Lord selects a steward rather than a son, as the 
medium of the illustration. It is evidently to indicate the 
tenure by which all men hold their earthly possessions — the 
relation in which all stand to God, the universal proprietor. 



AN APPAEEXT STUMBLING-BLOCK. 149 

The riches of the world are, in the nature and necessity of the 
case, but temporary. All hold them but in trust ; all have 
got to be removed from them ; and all by-and-by to render 
an account of their stewardship. Then, those who have been 
faithful as stewards will be admitted to an inheritance as 
sons ; those who have been faithful in what was another's — 
what was in no proper sense their own — will be placed over 
permanent possessions ; those who have used with discretion 
the deceitful and unrighteous mammon, will be entrusted with 
the true riches. 

Thus far all is plain. But now comes the stumbling-block. 
Why does the Saviour take, to illustrate his doctrine, the 
case, not of a faithful, but of an unjust steward ? Why not, as 
in Matthew, take one who, having received five talents went 
and traded with them — made them other five talents ; and 
thus, when the hour of reckoning came, was advanced to 
higher honor, and welcomed into the joy of his Lord? 
Would it not seem more accordant with the character of the 
Saviour and the great principle which he inculcates, to 
employ such an example, — that of a faithful and upright, as 
well as prudent steward, — instead of founding his lesson of 
spiritual wisdom on the basis of an example of mere worldly, 
unprincipled, and fraudulent sagacity? 

To this I answer, first, that the Saviour wishes to bring out 
distinctly the great fact that as all men are stewards, so to all 
there is coming a time of need and of destitution ; when they 
will be put out of their stewardship ; w 7 hen the world will actu- 
ally abandon them ; when all earthly resources will be cut 
off, and they, left friendless and portionless on earth, will need 
another class of friends and another kind of home. This 
would naturally be done, not by assuming a steward who was 



150 THREE PARABLES. s 

faithful to his master's interests, and therefore would be pro- 
moted under the same master, and in the same line of employ- 
ment, — who thus experiences no great change, and no actual 
exigency, — but by supposing one who had forfeited the favor 
of his employer, and who was driven out into a destitution ir- 
retrievable, except so far as his prudent foresight had provided 
against it. The assumption of a faithful steward would have 
furnished no scope for representing the actual change of con- 
dition,— that actual thrusting out from the stewardship and 
attendant comforts, — that pressing need of other friends, and 
another home, which is the universal destination of our 
death-devoted humanity. 

But secondly, might not the same end have been accom- 
plished by representing the master as wicked or unjust, and 
the steward as faithful, and in his fidelity securing friends who 
should have received him when driven out from his steward- 
ship ? Undoubtedly. But then the parable would have been 
much less forcible, because the contrast would have been 
much less striking. The argument now runs thus : You see 
how wise and sagacious the men of this world are, — how 
shrewd to provide for themselves home and friends in their hour 
of need, even at the expense of an utter disregard of the obli- 
gations of right and virtue. How highly they estimate this 
virtue of prudence is shown by the fact that the master of the 
unjust steward praised the display of it, even when exhibited 
at his own expense, and in violation of duties to him. Such, 
says the Saviour, are the men of this world. So shrewd are 
they in their calculations for the future, so wise in their gen- 
eration, so highly do they estimate the value of a provident 
regard for our future well-being, that they pause at no scruples, 
hesitate at no fraud which may subserve the accomplishment 



THE GENERAL SCOPE. 151 

of their ends : and not only do they practise knavery them- 
selves, but even its very victims lose sight of the injustice in 
admiration of the foresight which works through it. If such, 
then, be the value of foresight that men practise it for earthly 
friends, for a temporary home, for deceitful riches, at the ex- 
pense of justice and honor, — and to a certain extent applaud it 
in their fellows, — how eminently rational and proper to practise 
it for heavenly friends, for an eternal home, for the true and un- 
deceiving riches, for an everlasting inheritance, and in accord- 
ance with the eternal obligations of justice ! Thus conceived 
and pot, the argument for spiritual prudence and foresight 
becomes doubly and overwhelmingly strong. Still another 
reason, I think, which prompted the Saviour to this form of 
the parable, was to place in stronger contrast the deceitful 
and the true riches ; to show how thoroughly money is the 
mammon of unrighteousness ; how easily it is perverted and 
prostituted to unjust and base uses ; and therefore to place its 
possessors doubly on their guard. The riches of this world 
— our Saviour evidently meant to suggest to the avaricious 
Pharisees who stood by — easily becomes the mammon of un- 
righteousness ; such is its deceitful nature, that there is immi- 
nent danger that in husbanding it for earthly uses, we may 
sacrifice our spiritual and eternal welfare. 

I trust I have made clear the general scope and purpose of 
this parable, and the propriety of making an unjust steward 
the vehicle of the lesson which it conveys. As it is regarded 
as peculiarly difficult, I may be pardoned a moment's repeti- 
tion. First, we are all stewards, and amenable to God, the 
universal and absolute proprietor. Second, it was desirable 
to present a case of absolute ejection from the stewardship, in 
order to meet more exactly the case of men who have, at all 



152 THREE PARABLES. 

events, to be ejected from their earthly possessions, and with 
whom it becomes the most imperative dictate of prudence to 
provide themselves with other friends and another home. 
This renders natural the supposition of a faithless and profli- 
gate steward, who is turned out of his master's employ. And 
this being the character of the deposed steward, the expedient 
to which he will resort for meeting the emergencies of his con- 
dition, will be likely to be correspondingly unscrupulous. 
Nor will this weaken the force of the parable, — whose pur- 
pose is to recommend spiritual foresight in view of that uni- 
versal ejectment by death which we are all to experience, — 
inasmuch as the moral sphere into which the parable passes 
over, purifies it from all corruptible and grosser elements. 
Take the analogous case of the man who, finding a treasure 
hid in a field, goes and sells all he has and buys the field. The 
parable here does not concern itself in the slightest degree 
with the motives of the purchaser ; they may be intensely 
miserly ; and the act of purchase may be accompanied by 
fraudulent, or at least dishonorable concealment. To all this 
the parable is entirely indifferent. Its single purpose is to 
represent, under this figure, that priceless worth of the king- 
dom of heaven which makes it wisdom to sacrifice for it all 
our other possessions— here, of course, virtue and integrity be- 
longing to the very essence of the action. So in the case 
before us. The worldly providence may, or may not, be con- 
trolled by virtuous motives. The single point insisted upon 
is the importance, the pressing necessity of the providence, the 
forecast, the securing of friends and a home against an im- 
pending and inevitable need ; while it grows out of the very 
nature of the case that the injustice and fraud which marked 
the earthly transaction become wholly inadmissible in the 



SERPENTINE PRUDENCE. 153 

higher sphere where, in fact, prudence and virtue blend into 
one and become identical. Thirdly. I am satisfied that the 
Saviour intended by this form of the parable to put the stamp 
of reprobation on human riches ; to remind his hearers — ava- 
ricious Pharisees, see ver. 14 — how deceitful and false they 
are ; how liable to be prostituted to uujust purposes ; and how 
easily they may drown their pursuers and votaries in destruc- 
tion and perdition. Thus, while teaching directly a lesson of 
spiritual foresight, he deals an indirect but mighty blow at that 
idolatry of wealth which is the gospel's grand foe in every 
age. And finally, — such is the tacit argument, — if the chil- 
dren of this world display such prudent forethought for tem- 
porary abodes, at the expense of justice and right, how strong 
the argument for exercising, for the sake of eternal taberna- 
cles, that moral prudence, that true wisdom which is the 
loftiest attribute of humanity. 

I proceed now to particulars. Verse 8. " And the lord 
commended the unjust steward because he did wisely ; for 
the children of this world are in their generation wiser 
than the children of light." A word here first upon the 
translation. " The lord " is, with little doubt, the lord or 
master of the steward, and should be rendered, " his lord." 
Again, here, as in too many places in the New Testament, 
our version confounds the very dissimilar virtues of wisdom 
and prudence, which are separated in the original. Thus says 
the Saviour, "Be ye prudent as serpents and harmless (guile- 
less) as doves." The prudent virgins evinced their prudence 
by taking oil along with their lamps. In the case supposed 
in the parable, this was their highest virtue ; they differed 
from the foolish virgins only in their provident regard for a 
probable exigency. So here, the steward did not act wisely ; 



154 THREE PARABLES. 

he only acted shrewdly, intelligently, prudently, and for this 
sagacity received commendation. Prudence is a merely in- 
tellectual virtue ; wisdom is an intellectual and moral virtue. 
It implies the harmonious co-working of all the faculties of 
the soul — a judicious adaptation of means to lofty and noble 
ends. The forethought of the children of the world is only 
prudence; the forethought of the children of light is wisdom. 
Many have deemed it strange and unnatural that commen- 
dation should be pronounced upon the unjust steward ; and 
they have been disposed to regard the language as ironical. 
Yet it is difficult to see how an ironical construction can con- 
sist with the obvious scope of the parable. That is evidently 
to enforce the lesson of spiritual foresight from an example 
of temporal foresight ; and to turn the commendation into 
irony defeats the end of the illustration. The diffi- 
culty vanishes if we remember first that it is not the 
Saviour who utters the commendation, but the master of the 
steward, who, as one of the " children of this world," can ad- 
mire and applaud an act of sagacious foresight, indifferent to 
its moral quality, and in spite of its injurious bearing upon 
his own interests ; and secondly, and still more, if we recol- 
lect that it was not the injustice of the steward that was 
praised, but his prudence — his provident and dexterous antici- 
pation of the season of want. This is the whole extent of 
the commendation ; it is limited both by the circumstances 
of the case, and by the words standing in immediate connec- 
tion, " because he acted prudently." There is no more im- 
portant canon of scriptural interpretation than that we do 
not press words to their utmost capacity of meaning, but 
rather interpret them by the obvious demands and restrictions 
of the context. Thus Peter and the apostles were the founda- 



WOELDLY WISDOM. 155 

tion of the edifice of the church, not in every possible sense, 
nor in the highest possible sense, but in one very important 
sense, such as justified the language. Our Saviour " loved" 
the young man who came to him, not with the complacent 
love with which he loved John or Peter, but with that tender, 
compassionate sympathy with which a man may regard 
another in whom he sees the finer traits of natural character. 
Many Jews " believed " upon Christ, not savingly, but simply 
as declaring their conviction that he was the Messiah. I cite 
these examples as cautions against forcing words, in the free 
and artless language of the New Testament, beyond the ob- 
vious requisitions of the context. 

" The children of this world are wiser " (more prudent), is 
the commencement of our Lord's application of the parable. 
Its obvious meaning is, that they are more shrewdly provident 
in their own generation for their temporal interests, than the 
children of light in their generation for their spiritual inter- 
ests. "And J say unto you" adds the Saviour; as if antici- 
pating their thought that such a case could have no possible 
interest for them, and reminding them that they could, in 
fact, claim from it a most salutary lesson : " Make to your- 
selves friends of the (by means of the) mammon of unright- 
eousness ; that when ye fail they may receive you into ever- 
lasting habitations." 

This passage is evidently the application of the above par- 
able, and draws its imagery and interpretation from it. Thus 
regarding it we shall find in it no difficulty. The steward, 
while in the possession of wealth — whether his own or 
another's — had, by means of it, secured to himself friends, 
who, when his present resources failed him, should receive 
him into an earthly shelter. Now, says our Lord, imitate in 



156 THREE PARABLES. 

a higher sphere, and with true spiritual wisdom, the sagacious 
foresight of the child of this world. So use your earthly 
wealtn (the mammon of unrighteousness — an epithet suggested 
partly by the intrinsically false nature of worldly wealth, and 
partly by the fact that in the parable just given it had 
shown itself the supple instrument of unrighteousness) that 
ye may secure to yourselves friends who, when it fails you 
(this is probably the true rendering), shall receive you into 
abiding, even eternal habitations. Convert the unrighteous 
mammon into a servant of righteousness ; where the men of 
this world show prudence, do ye show wisdom; what they 
shrewdly but unscrupulously use as a means of providing 
themselves a temporary shelter, do ye wisely and righteously 
use for securing an eternal habitation. The " friends " who 
are to " receive " us might, perhaps, so far as the parable it- 
self is concerned, be God and the powers of the spiritual 
world, whose favor we secure by the right use of our temporal 
possessions ; but the following parable of the rich man and 
Lazarus, which is obviously intended to illustrate the case of 
him who does not use his worldly wealth for the securing of a 
spiritual home, points rather to the poor, and those whom our 
worldly riches may benefit, as those who are to admit and 
welcome us into the dwelling-places of bliss. That these 
friends have not the power or the office literally to receive us 
into Paradise is matter of no special consequence. The idea 
is carried out with reference to the parable above, where the 
benefited debtors were to receive the steward, their bene- 
factor, and illustrated in the following parable, where the 
selfish indifference of the rich man, luxuriating in his wealth, 
to the sufferings of the wretched Lazarus at his gate, deprived 
him of one who otherwise would have hastened upon his 



SIGNIFICANT TEACHING. 157 

death to open to him the gates of paradise, and welcome him 
to an eternal rest. 

In the following verses the Saviour adheres in part to the 
imagery of the parable, but in part abandons it for the in- 
trinsic relations of man to God, and of the earthly to the 
heavenly riches. Our earthly state is one of trial. The in- 
significant treasures of earth are committed to us to test our 
fitness for receiving the higher treasures of God's spiritual 
kiugdom. If we prove faithless in the former we can urge no 
claim to the latter. If we have squandered and abused the 
lesser treasures of God's providence, how can we claim the 
richer inheritance of his grace ? If we have not been faithful 
in the unrighteous mammon — the false, the deceiving, and 
too often corrupting riches of this world — how can we hope 
for the true riches, of which the former are but a shadow ? 
And if, as stewards, we have failed to use rightly and wisely 
that which is another's, that in which we have but a tran- 
sient proprietorship, that which we may be called at any 
moment to surrender, who will invest us with a permanent 
inheritance ? 

How solemn, how significant, how profound the teaching! 
What depth of thought in the Saviour's words ! How sub- 
limely simple their contrast of the riches of earth and the 
riches of heaven ! The " little " against the " much " ; the 
"unrighteous" and deceitful against the genuine and the 
" true " ; the " transitory and the alien " against the " possessed 
and the permanent." Such is the representation which leads 
us to ponder " which we will serve," when, in the following 
verse, the choice is presented between God and mammon. 

3. The rich man and Lazarus {Jjake 16 : 19-31). This 
ends the sublime and the solemn trilogy in which our 
o 



158 THREE PARABLES. 

Lord draws a series of weighty spiritual lessons from the use 
of earthly property. It is connected with that immediately 
preceding by several statements, apparently incoherent in 
their abrupt sententiousness, yet abundantly plain in their 
general scope. They are leveled at the Pharisees, who, covet- 
ous, haughty, self-righteous, stood listening, half in scorn and 
half in terror to the Great Teacher, and remind them that 
their sensuality and wickedness, though buried from the sight 
of men, are open to the eye of God ; that the old dispensation, 
which had fenced around their boasted privileges, is passing 
away ; but that the obligations of righteousness are unrepeal- 
able and eternal. He illustrates the statement by insisting 
on the sanctity of that marriage relation which they dissolved 
on the most frivolous pretenses, and then by embodying in a 
parable that great law of beneficent love under which we hold 
all earthly possessions. The parable is conceived, however, 
in immediate relation to the injunction, "Make to yourselves 
friends by means of the mammon of unrighteousness, that 
when it fails you, they [your friends] may receive you into 
everlasting habitations." This should be borne distinctly in 
mind, for it determines the general form and construction of 
the parable. The possessor of worldly wealth is brought into 
immediate contact with the child of want, whom he has thus 
the opportunity of befriending ; and then as the scene changes, 
and the veil of the future is lifted, we see the consequences of 
his selfish neglect, in his failure to secure alike an admission 
to the abodes of bliss, and a kindly ministry in mitigation of 
his pains. 

.Thus we see, first, why Lazarus is represented as laid at the 
rich man's gate, on which some needless speculation has been 
expended. It is simply to bring into close relation and sharp 



MISERABLE SHORT-SIGHTEDNESS. 159 

contrast the two personages of the parable ; to represent most 
vividly the blind and reckless indifference of the child of 
wealth, by bringing to his very gate the proper object of his 
charities,/whom a wise foresight would now secure as a friend 
against that time of need which comes to all. Here is the 
lordly reveller in the luxuries of earth ; there, the indigent 
wretch who pines for the crumbs from his table, and in default 
of human succor, is left to the compassionate ministry of the 
dogs. 

Again, the special idea of the parable accounts for the 
order in which their respective deaths are mentioned. The 
poor man died and was carried by angels to Abraham's 
bosom ; the rich man also died and was buried. " The death 
of the rich man last" says Alford, following Trench, " should 
be remembered. Lazarus was taken soon from his suffer- 
ings: Dives was left longer, that he might have space to 
repent." This is little better than fanciful ; the real reason 
has escaped them. The very conception of the parable 
requires that Lazarus should be in the future world in 
advance of the rich man ; that he be already an occupant of 
the abodes of bliss that, when the rich man arrives, his 
miserable short-sightedness may be manifest in having failed 
to secure by his earthly charities a friend who would now have 
hastened, not merely to extend to him the poor relief of 
cooliug his tongue, but to open to him, with eager gratitude, 
the portals of the everlasting mansions. 

And in harmony with this general conception of the para- 
ble is the portraiture of its two leading personages. It is a 
description not so much of character as of condition. The 
one is abundantly supplied with the goods of this world, 
splendidly apparelled, and faring sumptuously ; the other is 



160 THREE PARABLES. 

helplessly and miserably poor. The rich man's crime, his 
disqualification for the kingdom of heaven, so far as stated in 
the parable, is his wealth, and his selfish improvidence in its 
use. And even the selfishness is not so much contained in 
the description, as left to be inferred from the fact that he 
allowed the needy mendicant to lie unrelieved at his gate. 
The portraiture itself simply places the one, in his luxurious 
abundance, over against the other in his utter destitution. 
The former is not necessarily vicious, any more than the latter 
is necessarily virtuous. What the parable charges him with, 
and that only by implication, is neglect, indifference, improvi- 
dence. He had a chance, by the mammon of unrighteousness, 
to secure to himself a permanent friend, and he neglected it. 
He had a chance to invest a part of his deceitful and evanes- 
cent wealth in an incorruptible and eternal inheritance, and 
he recklessly threw away the oppportunity. No positive 
wickedness is alleged against him in the sphere of the parabolio 
representation, more than against the five virgins, whose fail- 
ure to take an adequate supply of oil excluded them from the 
marriage festival, or against the man who, on finding a treas- 
ure hidden in a field, should neglect to secure it by selling all 
his property. In the sphere of earthly action, the proceeding 
is simply improvident ; in the spiritual sphere, to which, of 
course, the parable points, it is not only improvidence, but 
wickedness. In the parable before us, the difference is essen- 
tially that of a rich and of a poor man : of a rich man, to 
whom belong the rich man's character and destination ; of a 
poor man who, as such, is entitled to the kingdom of God. 
This is, indeed, not in accordance with the absolute truth of 
things ; but it is in accordance with the prevailing gospel 
representation, and is founded in deep principles of our nature. 



THE POVERTY OF RICHES. 161 

Among men generally, — and to its full extent among the Jews 
of our Saviour's time, — wealth was held in honor, and poverty 
in contempt. The rich, the powerful, the proud, were pro- 
nounced happy on earth, and candidates for the blessedness 
of heaven. The poor, the lowly, the sorrowing, were spurned 
from the homes of earth and the abodes of future bliss. The 
gospel reversed all this. It brought down the proud and ex- 
alted the humble. It denounced woes upon the rich, and ut- 
tered its blessings on the poor. The opening beatitude of the 
Sermon on the Mount, is a blessing on the poor, the literally 
poor, who have a spirit corresponding to their position. Luke 
gives it without qualification (6 : 21, 24), " Blessed are ye 
poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Woe unto you that 
are rich, for ye have received your consolation. Woe unto 
you that laugh now, for ye shall weep and lament." Here is 
precisely the key-note of our parable. There is no more per- 
fect clue to its interpretation than these brief utterances of 
our Lord. They proceed on the assumption that poverty is 
blessed, and that riches are cursed ; that the affluent of earth 
shall be beggared in the world of retribution, and the beggar 
exalted to Paradise. And such is the general tenor of the 
New Testament language. Riches are treated as a danger 
and an evil. The rich young man is commanded, as the first 
requisite of discipleship, to sell all his property and distribute 
to the poor, and he shall have treasure in heaven ; and a rich 
man's entrance into the kingdom of God is reckoned as one 
of the miraculous marvels of Almighty power. 

Of course all this is not to be taken literally. In the eye 
of God, riches are nothing and poverty is nothing. The costly 
sacrifices of wealth, the two mites of indigence, have value 
only as they express the spirit of love. It is always under- 



162 THREE PARABLES. 

stood that mere poverty can give no title to a heavenly inheri- 
tance, just as that mere wealth is no ground for exclusion. 
But the first business of the gospel is to reverse the false judg- 
ments of men ; to strip off the gilded trappings which deck 
with an illusory splendor tire gods of their idolatry. Associ- 
ated, therefore, as wealth is, inveterately and most obstinately 
in the human conception with happiness here and hereafter, 
powerful as is its hold upon the affections of men, formidable 
and manifold as are its tempations, what wonder that it 
should be taken as the symbol of that worldliness with which, 
practically, it is so commonly associated ? "What wonder that 
its antithesis, poverty, so despised of men, should be repre- 
sented as in honor with God ? The New Testament deals with 
the concrete rather than the abstract, and strikes at the 
subtle principle of evil through its customary outward embodi- 
ment. 

So much for the literal interpretation of the parable. Thus 
far De Wette is right against Alford, in making it the con- 
demnation of wealth and the exaltation of poverty. But De 
Wette errs grievously in making this its ultimate scope. This 
is only the shell, the husk, the parabolic garb. We must 
penetrate beneath it to the spiritual truth. We must trans- 
late the parable into that spiritual realm where alone it finds, 
like every other parable, its true significance. When the 
Saviour elsewhere condemns wealth, he in reality merely con- 
demns the worldliness of which wealth is but too common a 
concomitant, and therefore a natural symbol. When he blesses 
poverty, he in reality blesses that spirit of renunciation of the 
world, of which outward poverty seems the natural expo- 
nent. So here, when we come to apply the parable, the rich 
man symbolizes him who makes a god of this world, no matter 



THE HEART OF THE PARABLE. 163 

though he were the veriest mendicant in existence ; Lazarus, 
him whose treasure is in heaven, no matter though kingdoms 
yielded him their revenues. Thus the outward garb of the 
parable drops off of itself; the factitious distinctions of 
worldly wealth and poverty melt away. The intrinsic dis- 
tinction of character takes the place of the adventitious one 
of condition. The relative position of the parties might, in 
fact, be reversed. The rich man who would hold his worldly 
goods loosely, using them as God's steward for beneficent 
ends, might and would be he whom the angels would delight 
to bear to paradise. The beggar who, steeped to the lips in 
poverty, yet clung in heart to the world, would be the heir to 
the curse and to the realm of fire. Or, on the other hand, 
the rich man might have fed and clothed all the beggars of a 
kingdom, might have given all his goods to feed the poor 
and his body to be burned, and yet for want of the true spirit 
of charity might be as far as ever from the eternal mansions. 
In opposition then to Trench, I maintain that we have here 
decisively a parable. The rich man and the poor man are 
each more than is contained in the actual description. The 
rich man stands for the idolater of this world, whatever form 
his idolatry may assume ; the poor man for the humble 
child of faith, who, whether in rags or on a throne, lives in 
communion with the Invisible. And so again the change of 
fortunes, which, in the parable, appears as the mere adjust- 
ment of the scales of outward circumstance, becomes, in the 
application, the righteous award to character — to a life of 
godliness on the one hand, and of godless worldliness on the 
other. Thus explaining the narrative, we press nothing and 
we lose nothing. We do no violence to the parabolic language 
for the sake of forcing upon it a meaning which literally it 



161 THEEE PAEABLE3. 

will not bear ; while at the same time, by translating it as a 
parable into a higher sphere, with other declarations of the 
New Testament as our guide, we give to it all its solemn and 
weighty meaning. A further examination of the parable sus- 
tains this view. 

As concerns the mere form of representation, the rich man 
is simply a rich man, and as such has his good things in the 
present life ; the poor man is simply a poor man, and as 
such is entitled to blessedness hereafter. By the mere 
natural law of compensation, the poor man, when he dies 
is conveyed by the angels to the bosom of Abraham, 
and the rich man after death finds himself in destitution 
and torment. Lazarus has in life received his evil things, 
and now is comforted ; Dives has received in life his good 
things, and now is tormented. Neither Christ's portraiture 
of the two, nor the language of Abraham points, in itself 
to any radical diversity of character. The narrative is 
simply a parabolic extension of the " Blessed are ye poor, 
for yours is the kingdom of God : but woe unto you that are 
rich, for ye have received your consolation." 

Looking, then, at the obvious and transparent import of 
these parables, it would seem impossible to doubt who are 
meant by the righteous that need no repentance. Yet Trench 
is sorely puzzled in regard to them, and Alford errs in his ex- 
planation. Alford says : " They are the subjeetively righteous, 
and this saying respects their own view of themselves " — an 
explanation w T holly inconsistent with the whole tenor of the 
parables. For it would be but sheer nonsense, or poor irony, 
to say that there is more joy in heaven over one genuine con- 
vert to holiness, than over ninety and nine wicked persons 
who fancy themselves righteous. And the whole structure 



A SUBJECTIVE SUPERIORITY. 165 

of the parables forbids the interpretation. " The ninety 
and nine sheep," as Trench justly observes, " have not wan- 
dered ; the nine pieces of money have not been lost ; the elder 
brother has not left his father's house." The sound condition 
of the one class is just as real as the recovery of the other. 
But Trench's solution of the matter is equally objectionable. 
We are to understand " these righteous as really such, but 
also that their righteousness is merely legal, is that of the old 
dispensation, so that the least in the kingdom of heaven is 
greater than they." This is a strange and almost unaccountable 
perversion of the obvious spirit of the parables. The simple 
doctrine is that we rejoice more over a sick man restored to 
health than over one who had not been sick. Should we 
help the explanation by endeavoring to show that the man 
who has not been sick is still not thoroughly well ? In the 
parables, the ninety and nine sheep, the nine pieces of silver, 
the faithful son, are all genuine and true ; each of them is just 
as valuable as the sheep, the piece of money, and the son that 
had been lost. The recovery but restores to an equality of 
condition ; it establishes in the recovered no intrinsic superi- 
ority. The superiority is merely subjective. It lies in the 
estimation of the possessor. It consists simply in the fact that 
they have been endangered. They have been dead and are 
alive ; they have been lost and are found ; they have awak- 
ened bitter apprehension and anguish, and the peculiar joy 
over their recovery is but the reaction from the sorrow over 
their loss. 

The " righteous" then, here, are those who are really and 
truly such : unfallen, sinless beings, wherever they may be, 
who, having never apostatised, have never clouded the joy of 
the universe, nor stirred the compassions of a benevolent 



166 THKEE PAPwABLES. 

heart. The principle of the parable is as applicable to hea- 
ven as to earth. The angels of God rejoice with a special 
and peculiar exultation over a ransomed soul. I know not 
why the assertion does not hold of them literally. They are 
finite. They cannot grasp at once the whole compass of 
truth, and all the possibilities of existence. Events break 
upon them, unexpected, startling, just as upon mortals. The 
scroll of providential dealing unrolls itself to them by degrees ; 
new and unlooked-for events inspire them with new and un- 
wonted emotions. As they witness some fresh miracle of 
grace, — the snatching of a sinner from endless and unutterable 
wrath, — a jubilant ecstacy, such as no soul whose eternal 
well-being no apostasy had periled could awaken, may well, 
kindle their bosoms and their songs. Of God himself, who 
sees the end from the beginning, whose infinite intelli- 
gence grasps the utmost compass, and fathoms the pro- 
foundest depths of being ; who sees all the ruin from which the 
faithful are kept, just as he sees all the ruin from which the 
penitent are delivered — of him perhaps the language can be 
used only in accommodation to our finite conceptions. He 
appears, he acts as if he felt so. He leaves the ninety and 
nine to go after the lost. He turns, as it were, his back on 
the shining myriads of light, on all the holy ones of the uni- 
verse, — wherever and however many they are, — that he may 
come on an embassy of saving love to our apostate and rebel- 
lious humanity. Amid the myriad millions of adoring spirits 
that feel the pulsations of a blissful immortality, he is not con- 
tent until he has made an effort, such as only a God could 
make, to rescue this world of man from the dominion of sin 
and death. 

What, then, is meant by the just, the righteous, here, is 



THE UXLOST EIGHTEOUS. 167 

manifest enough. They are the sheep that have not left the 
fold ; the money that has not been lost ; the son that has not 
quitted his father's house. They are not ironically, but really, 
those who have no need of a physician; who are safe in the 
mansions of eternal love ; over whom Infinite compassion has 
never yearned with trembling solicitude, and who cannot, 
therefore, inspire the peculiar joy that belongs to the lost one 
found, to the sick one healed, to the dead one raised. They are 
strictly holy beings, who, like the angels, need no repentance. 
Whether such beings are really to be found on earth, is not 
material to the question. The scribes and Pharisees, fancying 
themselves righteous, condemn the Saviour for admitting the 
society of sinners. Our Lord meets them on their own ground. 
If they are the righteous persons they profess to be, — or just so 
far as they are such, — they are not the ones who need his 
ministry of love. In the application of the principle to the 
scribes and Pharisees, there would be indeed a sublime and 
fearful irony — that they whose hearts are sepulchres of moral 
putrefaction should set themselves up as patterns of moral ex- 
cellence, and alone fit to associate with Christ! But the 
Saviour takes them on their own assumption. He decides not 
on their case. He lays down a general principle, entirely 
true, whether it includes them or not, and illustrates it by the 
parables before us. 

The only apparent objection to our view is found in the con- 
duct of the elder son in the third parable, who murmurs at the 
welcome extended to his reclaimed brother. But the parable 
is really completed with the welcome reception given to the 
penitent son, just as in the parable of Dives and Lazarus with 
the refusal of Abraham to extend relief to the rich man. The 
incident of the elder son's coming in with his querulous expos- 



168 THREE PARABLES. 

tulatious adds, however, completeness and force, as well as pic- 
turesqueness, to the representation ; for it gives an opportunity 
of stating afresh, and even more explicitly, the grounds of the 
joyful demonstration. " Son," says the father, " thou art ever 
with me, and all that I have is thine." There is no need of spe- 
cial joy over thee — thou hast not been lost. There is no need 
of killing for thee the fatted calf; the whole treasures of the 
household are always at thy command. But this my son was 
dead and is alive again ; he was lost and is found. That the 
son appears murmuring at the father belongs simply to the 
parabolic representation. This must always have its own 
truth, irrespective of the spiritual doctrine shadowed forth. 
Thus, in the parable, the father waits, without making any 
exertion, until the son of his own accord comes to his senses ; 
the spiritual alien never returns to his father's house until 
drawn by the active and constraining love of God. In the 
parable the son is pardoned without atonement or intercessor ; 
not so the spiritual penitent. And so, in the parable, the 
elder son may indulge in a petulant jealousy over the tokens 
of joy lavished on the reclaimed profligate; the sinless being 
whom he represents would greet the sinner's return to God 
with unmingled rejoicings. Such things are not to be pressed ; 
they are essential to this mode of exhibiting truth. The in- 
troduction of the present scene furnishes a more direct and 
sharp rebuke to the murmuring Pharisees. Their conduct, 
assuming them to be righteous, is like that of the elder son. 

I need scarcely add that the parables are weakened instead 
of strengthened, impoverished instead of enriched, by the 
many fanciful conceits with which even able interpreters, as 
Trench and Alford, have overlaid their severe and simple 
beauty. We gain nothing when we hold up the light of our 



CONSISTENT IMAGERY. 169 

farthing candle to the sun of the Saviour's luminous and ra- 
diant teachings. The parables of the sheep, the piece of 
money, the lost son, are all carried out in consistent imagery. 
To find in them different modes of the expression of God's 
love, as his seeking and forbearing love ; to find a portrayal 
of different degrees of guilt, — as that the piece of money rep- 
resents a greater sinner than the sheep ; to find in the woman, 
the church, or in the house, the church, and in the woman, 
the Holy Spirit, etc., is to indulge in fancies wholly unworthy 
of judicious and learned interpreters. It will be time. enough, 
when we have exhausted the Saviour's meaning in the para- 
bles, to inject into them our own. And surely the doctrine 
of God's delight in saving sinners — of the special joy in 
heaven over a penitent rebel, is a doctrine weighty enough to 
justify three parables of some thirty verses, without, by 
spiritualizing all their incidental drapery, finding in them a 
multitude of side-truths which the Saviour never intended, 
and which, while seeming to enrich the parable, in fact only 
mar its unity, and divert attention from its grand central 
truth. Of course, in the third parable, which draws its imagery 
from the sphere of rational and moral life, the interest 
deepens, and the points of legitimate analogy become more 
numerous. 



XL 

THE FATHER OF LIES. 

u TT7HEN he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own : for 
wf he is a liar, and the father of it " (John 8 : 44 ; 
Rec. Eng. Version). " When one speaketh falsehood, he 
speaketh from that which belongeth to him; because his father 
also is a liar." 

To the English readers of the common version of this pas- 
sage, it presents some slight awkwardness, and some little 
obscurity. It seems doubtful whether in the phrase " of his 
own," "of" is equivalent to "from" or " concerning" ; and 
as to the import of " his own," one inquires who or what, is or 
are, " his own," of which or whom the devil here speaks. 
Secondly, the words " for he is a liar and the father of it," 
sounds in the connection much like an identical proposition, 
and the words " of it " are but harshly developed out of the 
preceding " liar." In plain and idiomatic English, the reader 
would naturally expect something like : " For he is both him- 
self a liar, and the father of liars, or of lying" (abro^ re yap 
<p£U(TT7]q £<J7\,/.ai Tzarrjp tojv (/>£U(TTU)v, or, tuu <p£udou^\ 

To the reader of the original, the passage presents other 
and much graver difficulties. The obscurity of the ambiguous 
"of" disappears indeed, resolving itself into "from," and the 
plural " his own," may be " the traits which belong to him," 
" his inherent, or inherited characteristics." But in the orig- 
inal, the noun with its article naturally forms a subject instead 
of a predicate, and there is no good Greek scholar who, from 
170 



A CONJECTURAL HEADING. 171 

mere grammatical considerations, would hesitate to render the 
clause, " because his father also is a liar, 5 ' — or possibly, though 
less idiomatically, "because he is a liar, and so also is his 
father." Treating " his father " as a predicate, either of the 
two renderings of abrou, " of it " and " of him," are about 
equally inadmissible., though " of it " is somewhat more toler- 
able. At all events, without unduly aggravating the diffi- 
culty, we cannot but feel that in the articled noun which 
should, by all good usage, be a subject, and in the clumsy use 
of aurou, whether as " of it " or " of him,"-— as well perhaps as 
in the " speak eth of his own," — we have a complication of 
difficulties, and even solecisms, quite foreign to the generally 
idiomatic, and not unfrequently elegant style of the Apostle 
John. On the other hand, the rendering to which grammati- 
cal idiom almost forces us, viz., " his father also is a liar," 
throws us back on the unscriptural and monstrous doctrine of 
a father of the devil, or a Demiurge ^Arjixwupyoq), asserting 
rival claims to those of God. 

The only legitimate escape from these difficulties is by 
changing the subject of the verb kaXrf, speaketh. Fortunately 
this is of easy accomplishment, and that by either of two 
methods : the one, a conjectural emendation of the text ; the 
other, the application of a somewhat rare grammatical law. 
Neither of these is difficult ; though in my opinion that 
which we might feel least consonant with critical usage, is in 
reality most probably the true one. This is the conjectural 
reading which for orav XaX-fi, when he speaketh, or may speak, 
reads oq uv XaXrf, whoever may speak, thus introducing in 
place of the devil, an indefinite human utterer of the lie. 
This conjectural reading, given by Lachmann, has but little 
external authority, and though intrinsically easy, and in 



172 THE FATHER OF LIES. 

itself entirely probable, yet on tbe generally correct prin- 
ciple which rejects unnecessary, though plausible emenda- 
tions of the text where grammatical rules will serve the pur- 
pose, is not without objection. 

The rule which applies in the present case turns upon the 
freedom with which the Greek deals with the verb and its 
subject, easily passing from singular to plural, and not in- 
frequently substituting an indefinite subject when the sub- 
ject is readily supplied from the context by the reader. 
Thus Paul : " His letters, they say (??)(*(), says one, are 
weighty and powerful." So 2 Cor. 3 : 16, idv iniffrpeiprj -npoq 
Kbpiov, if one shall turn to the Lord ; though the subject may 
indeed be supplied from the preceding -/.apdiav, heart. Yet I 
think the indefinite construction preferable. So 2 Cor. 8 : 
12, el yap i) irpo&ufita npoxeirat, " if there be the forward mind, 
(one is) accepted," or possibly it, the mind, is accepted. So 
Plat. Crit., 49c, " if (one) suffer anything whatever at their 
hands." So Aristot., Lib. I., 5. So many examples might 
be cited. For the grammatical authority see Kiihner, Gr. 
Gram., sec. 238, rem. c. : ." In the third pers. sing, of the 
verb, auroq is frequently omitted." Buttmann's Gr. Gram. 
(Ed. Kobinson) sec. 129, 19 : " The noun can be omitted, 
and consequently the verb stand alone when under this idea 
of one, some one, is understood either the person on whom the 
verb, or the action depends." 

It is thus seen that the verb rendered in this way has no 
real difficulty. The rule is sustained by numerous examples, 
and fortified by the highest grammatical authorities. It pro- 
duces precisely the same result as is accomplished by adopting 
the amended reading cited by Lachmann, and is not liable to 
the objection of a doubtful emendation. There is in truth not 



AN EVIL PARENTAGE. 173 

the slightest objection to it as a grammatical law, and the pres- 
ent is a case in which the principle finds special applicability. 
The Saviour has under consideration the Jews, in their double 
character of liars and murderers; " Ye are," says he, "from 
your father the devil," i. e., the father from whom ye are 
sprung is the devil. He was a murderer from the beginning, 
and he stood not in the truth, because the truth does not 
exist in him. The devil was the primal murderer. He 
began his connection with humanity by the murder of the 
race. The reference is not to the murder of Abel by Cain, 
which was but a single incidental, and as it were, sporadic 
effect of the grand homicidal act by which death had been 
introduced into the world, and had struck at the very heart 
of humanity. The murderous spirit then, wherever it displays 
itself, is the fruit of the working of the devil. When the 
Jews sought the life of Jesus, he charges that they were but 
carrying out the spirit of the primal murderer ; they were but 
doing the deeds of their father. But the devil had begun his 
work of death by falsehood. He had seduced our first parents 
into sin by a lie directed against the Divine veracity. " Ye 
shall not surely die," is his declaration by which he impeached 
the truth of God, and plunged them into disobedience of his 
commands. Thus the Lord charges the Jews with inheriting 
from their father, the devil, the spirit of both murder and of 
falsehood. The devil was a murderer from the beginning ; 
and " he stood not in the truth because the truth is not in 
him " ; and as his murderous spirit has propagated itself in his 
human votaries, so their spirit of falsehood comes from the 
same source. " When any one speaketh falsehood, he speak eth 
after the manner of his kindred ; " or perhaps better, " from 
the qualities which are inherently, or by inheritance, his," 



174 THE FATHER OF LIES. 

" for his father also is a liar." Thus the two great crimes by 
which the devil effected the ruin of the human race, murder 
and falsehood, are united in this one forcible utterance of the 
Lord. And assuredly the declaration that when a man — one 
of the members of the apostate race — utters falsehood, he speaks 
that which he has inherited from a lying father, seems a much 
weightier declaration and goes much deeper into the matter 
of the discourse, than that which makes the Lord to say that 
when Satan utters falsehood he speaks from his own ; " for he 
is a liar, and the father of it." And in adopting this con- 
struction we relieve the sentence from several difficulties, and 
bring the whole discourse into unity. 

I may add that the use of the subjunctive XaXrJ, when one 
may speak, is not the construction which we should expect 
to be applied to the devil ; but it would be more appropriate 
to his human disciple. The conjunctive construction — when 
one may be speaking — suits naturally a human personage 
whom we do not assume to be always and necessarily and 
everywhere uttering falsehood, rather than the great primal 
liar whose sphere is falsehood, and regarding whom we should 
naturally say ore XaXz't to </>sddoc, when he speaks falsely, as 
his natural and necessary utterance. The subjunctive then 
(laXy), favors the human utterer, as one who may be uttering 
lies, not as one who does so necessarily and constantly. Nor 
can it be said that the Lord in introducing the human subject 
is passing from the natural sphere of his discourse. It is men 
with whom he here has properly to do. It is men whom he 
has charged with the intention to slay him, in the spirit of the 
original murderer ; and it is but natural that the human liar, 
as well as the human murderer, should be also traced back to 
the paternity of his crime in his father, the devil. And I 



AN ACCEPTED CONSTRUCTION. 175 

may add that this is only apparently in a spirit of severity. 
In reality the language is that of extenuation. It is in some 
sort a lightening of the charge to throw it back on another 
as its original author, from whom the secondary authors of 
the crime have received their inspiration. None knew better 
than did the Lord, how deep-seated, how self-originated, how 
truly infernal was the motive of the Prince of Darkness. 

Finally, as to this general construction I would say that it 
was first suggested by Bishop Middleton, author of a learned 
treatise on the Greek " Article." It was adopted by Scholefield 
and Heinsius, and after meeting various degrees of scholarly ap- 
proval and rejection, is, if not rapidly, at least surely, growing 
into favor with modern interpreters. It has been adopted by 
Professor Westcott, an able and learned critic, in his " Pop- 
ular Commentary on the New Testament " ; and has been 
adopted by Professors Milligan and Moultrie, of Aberdeen 
and Cambridge. It is placed in the margin by the Anglo- 
American revisers of the New Testament, and having respect 
alike to the thought and the construction, I cannot but think 
that our scholarship will remove a very serious disfigurement 
from our sacred text when it follows the Greek text in mak- 
ing our Lord charge upon the primal murderer and the pri- 
mal liar the inspiration of this spirit of homicide and false- 
hood. 



XII. 
THE HEATHEN AND THE LIGHT OF NATURE. 

Romans 1 : 18. 

THE Epistle to the Romans contains two very striking 
passages pertaining to the responsibility of the heathen 
world, which, taken together, seem absolutely exhaustive, and 
to cover the entire ground. The one is found in the first 
chapter, the other in the second. The one comes in directly 
and as the starting point of the apostle's main argument for 
the guilt and condemnation of the heathen ; the other comes 
in incidentally, as a mere side notice in connection with the 
discussion of the still heavier responsibility, and therefore still 
deeper guiltiness of the Jew. The one presents the objective, 
the other the subjective grounds of their criminality. The 
former starts from their relation to the outward world ; the 
latter from their inward moral constitution. The time has 
gone by when the child-like simplicity and innocence of the 
heathen were alleged as a reason for withholding missionary 
effort, and declining to import among them the benefits 
of Christianity. The wickedness and degradation inevita- 
bly attendant on paganism are universally acknowledged. 
Yet it can never be uninstructive to go back and see how the 
apostle to the Gentiles declares and explains its wickedness. 
The first passage is all that I now propose to deal with — 
that which regards man's relations to the world without. 
Paul has stated, as his thesis, the need of that righteousness of 
176 



SUPPRESSED TRUTH. 177 

faith by which alone man can be justified before God. The 
necessity of this arises from that wickedness and impiety of 
men, which, in its unrighteous suppression of the truth, brings 
down upon them the wrath of God. I say suppression of the 
truth ; not " holding it in unrighteousness," but holding it 
down, — this is what the apostle affirms, — arresting it in its 
natural development, and preventing it from coming out in 
its rightful sway over their understandings and lives. 

But what is the ground of this charge? What is the truth 
which they suppress ? The apostle proceeds to answer the 
question. It is the truth of God, " that which may be known 
of God," which is manifest among them, because God hath 
made it manifest to them. This means, of course, not all that 
may be known of God, the fullness of his natural and moral 
attributes, but the more obvious, palpable attributes of the 
Deity, such as most readily strike the human intelligence, and 
constitute in their totality a just, though by no means complete, 
representation of the Divine Being. The eternal power, which 
of course implies the eternal being, the Divine wisdom, maj- 
esty, and goodness (all that is fairly implied in the Godhead, 
or divinity) of the Creator — all these he has set forth before 
their eyes with a clearness which to refuse to recognize in- 
volves a virtual abnegation of their reason.* 

But how, again, are these evidences of divinity presented 
to them ? We answer, in the material universe and in the 
economy of Providence. God's invisible perfections, his 
eternal power and divinity, are from the creation of the world 
clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made. 
These attributes, invisible to sense, are discernible by the rea- 
son. What of God man cannot see with the eye of his body, 
he can and ought to see with the eye of his mind. Paul gives 



178 THE HEATHEN AND THE LIGHT OF NATURE. 

ns in the most explicit language his theory regarding the rela- 
tions of the material universe to God on the one hand, and 
to human reason on the other. He regards that universe as in 
a most essential sense a manifestation of God ; a mirror from 
which are reflected forth some of the essential perfections of 
his being. He recognizes again in the living soul created in 
the image of God, a principle that is capable of discerning 
him when so manifested. He hesitates not to declare man's 
power of ascending from the creation to the Creator. He 
thus vouches for the reality and legitimacy of that intuition 
by which human reason, witnessing certain phenomena, affirms 
a cause adapted and adequate to their production, and he finds 
in the works and ways of God sufficient authority for man's 
affirming a mighty, wise, and benevolent author. That Paul 
ever reasoned metaphysically upon this matter, we have no 
ground for believing. That he ever attempted any formal 
analysis of the soul's intuitive convictions; that he ever 
weighed in metaphysical balances, that principle of causality 
in man which, with inexorable sternness, binds the phenome- 
non to its cause, may well be doubted. He took that view of 
the matter which belongs to straightforward, unsophisticated 
common sense. He declared that to the eye of reason the 
heavens shine with the glory of God ; that in the ear of rea- 
son the universe is vocal with the praises of its Creator. It 
may well be questioned, I think, whether any philosophy can 
go higher or deeper than this ; whether this simple utterance 
of common sense is not the final goal of speculation in this 
matter ; the ark to which, after sweeping with restless pinion 
over the billowy ocean of doubt, she will not at last return 
with folded wing as to her only secure resting-place. We do 
not believe that there is any deeper philosophy than this, that 



AN "elder scripture." 179 

man is so allied to God in his mental and moral constitution, 
bears kindled within him such a spark of the eternal reason, 
that where God manifests himself, whether in word or in work, 
man in the normal working of his reason, discerns divine 
footprints, and feels the obligation to adore. 

And not merely to adore. Says the apostle : " When they 
knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thank- 
ful." The language implies that God in nature lays his 
claim upon men not only for adoration, but for gratitude. 
His claim may of course be partly founded upon the evi- 
dences of goodness and benevolence with which, to- the eye 
of reason, the creation is fraught. And here we may supple- 
ment Paul's language in Romans by his oral statement to a 
Gentile audience in Acts 14 : 17, in which he tells them that 
God, however apparently withdrawn from any care of man, 
" has not left himself without a witness, in that he has given 
them rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, and filled their 
hearts with food and gladness." Thus in the view of the 
apostle, God challenges in his providence the gratitude of his 
creatures, just as in his works of creative might and skill he 
challenges their adoration ; as the wondrous mechanism of 
the universe suggests his eternal power and infinite majesty, 
so does the unceasing flow of his providential benefactions 
suggest his infinite goodness ; as surely as the one appeals 
to his intelligence, the other lays its claims upon his affec- 
tions. 

Nature then, according to the apostle, is God's "elder 
Scripture," in which he reveals himself just as really, though 
not as fully, as in his written word. Is there any good reason 
for questioning this ? Modern science, or rather modern sci- 
entific men, have drawn it into question, apparently in the 



180 THE HEATHEN AND THE LIGHT OF NATURE. 

interests of that atheistic philosophy which seeks to banish its 
author from the universe, and exults with a strange and sui- 
cidal complacency, at finding itself" in a forsaken and father- 
less world." Others have been disposed to deny it from regard 
for the honor of the Bible, that this may have no rival in its 
prerogative of disclosing God to man. If nature reveals God, 
they ask, what is the use of a second, written, revelation ? The 
answer is easy. The revelation made in nature may be real, 
but not sufficient. It may give us the alphabet of religious 
knowledge, but not be able to induct us into its deeper mys- 
teries. It may disclose God's natural attributes, but be far 
from unveiling fully his moral perfections. Besides, it is not 
merely knowledge that man wants, but redemption ; not merely 
an intellectual apprehension of God, but such a disclosure of 
him as shall bring us to his feet in penitence and love, and 
bring him to us with the boon of salvation. This in fact is 
the main purpose of the Bible. Its chief function is not spec- 
ulative, but practical. Invaluable as are its revelations to 
the intellect, they sink into secondary importance compared 
with its disclosure of God's method of mercy for a lapsed and 
condemned race. Its real characteristic value is that of the 
gradual unfolding through all of its successive stages, of the 
great mystery of God reconciling the world to himself through 
his manifestation in the flesh. Without this, the clearest rev- 
elations would be unavailing. Divine truth might blaze upon 
the intellect with the brilliancy of a thousand sunbeams, yet 
it would leave the heart in the gloom of a moral midnight. 
With this, the Bible towers up in unapproachable and peer- 
less grandeur, as at once the full revealer of God, and the sole 
and single revealer of salvation. 

One or two remarks, in closing, on the phraseology of the 



TERMS EXPLAINED. 181 

passage on which I have been commenting. It is a very 
striking one in its rhetorical structure. But I remark only 
on two points. First, the word " understand " but very inad- 
equately renders the Greek word which it professes to trans- 
late. It means to apprehend intellectually, to discern with 
the eye of the reason, in contrast with the knowledge furnished 
by the senses. It is the same word as that used in Hebrews 
11 : 3, to inform us that by faith we understand, i. e., rationally 
discern, that the worlds were framed by the word of God. It 
is placed directly before the words " clearly see," forming at 
once its antithesis and its explanation. Again, the word here 
rendered " Godhead," scarcely answers to the definiteness with 
which the Bible has taught us to conceive that term. It is an 
abstract formed from an adjective, signifying divine, — not as 
in Col. 2 : 9, from a noun, signifying God, but in adaptation to 
the vaguer knowledge imparted by nature, — and w T ould be ex- 
actly rendered by our word divinity. As nearly then as this 
magnificently constructed passage can be rendered into Eng- 
lish, it would, perhaps, run thus : " For his unseen attributes, 
from the creation of the world, being by his works rationally 
discerned, are distinctly seen, — or are, by his works, with the 
eye of the mind distinctly seen, — alike his eternal power and 
divinity." 



XIII. 
SIN AND DEATH IN ADAM AND THE KACE. 

" In that all sinned."— Komans 5 : 12. 

THE Bible is the microcosm of the universe ; the Epistle 
to the Romans is the microcosm of the Bible. The 
Bible solves the problems of human history ; the Epistle to 
the Romans solves the problems of the Bible. In his eluci- 
dation of the central doctrine of justification by faith the 
apostle sweeps over the whole range of that wonderful book, 
from Genesis to Revelation. Man unfallen, and man fallen ; 
man fallen, and man restored ; the condition of the Jewish 
world, and the condition of the Gentile ; humanity without 
law, and humanity under law ; the hopeless struggle of un- 
aided reason and conscience against the tyranny of sin ; the 
successful struggle of the emancipated soul carried forward 
to complete victory and final glorification ; every heavenly 
doctrine and every human duty — all are swept into the cur- 
rent of this matchless discussion, all are embraced in the com- 
prehensive survey, and unfolded by the energetic eloquence 
of this great Christian Demosthenes. He is a wise man who 
has fathomed the divine philosophy of the Epistle to the 
Romans, for he knows at once man and God ; humanity in 
its apostasy and wretchedness, and humanity in its restoration 
and glorious future. 

We may well believe, therefore, that beyond any other 
equal portion of Scripture, — the immediate discourses of our 
182 



183 

Lord scarcely excepted, — the Epistle to tlie Romans is impor- 
tant to the biblical student. For into no other equally 
restricted portion are compressed so full a statement and so 
profound a discussion of the great truths to whose practical 
enforcement the apostle's life was devoted. To this character 
of the epistle several causes concur. In the fullness of his 
physical and mental energies, when his views had attained 
their utmost breadth and ripeness, with as yet no symptom 
of the decay that was to come with advancing years and inces- 
sant toil, he set himself to address to a church occupying a pre- 
eminently central and commanding position, a comprehensive 
and elaborate resume of those great truths of the gospel, alike 
speculative and practical, which experience, reflection, and 
the infallible teachings of the Spirit had caused to take full 
possession of his soul. Fortunately too, the epistle was drawn 
out by no special exigencies of the Roman church. No per- 
plexities to be resolved, no strifes to be reconciled, no alarm- 
ing defection to be arrested, turned aside — as in the epistles to 
the Corinthians and the Galatians — the natural current of his 
thoughts, and prevented him from giving, as a precious heri- 
tage to the church, those general features and aspects of the 
gospel which stamp it with its universal and world-wide 
character, and which his long Christian and apostolical expe- 
rience had enshrined in his soul as pre-eminently precious 
and important. Hence this epistle has ever been the battle- 
ground of religious controversy. Original and imputed sin, 
and personal and imputed righteousness ; universal and lim- 
ited atonement ; necessity and free will ; election and repro- 
bation — have all fought their battles over its profound and 
pregnant utterances ; and around these, doubtless, the contest 
will continue to rage till "the battle-flags are furled," and the 



184 SIN AND DEATH IN ADAM AND THE RACE. 

Sabbath of millennial harmony shall descend upon our dis- 
tracted earth. 

Among these utterances few have provoked more various 
and obstinate discussion than the paragraph containing the 
brief phrase which stands at the head of this article. I pro- 
pose to discuss this passage especially in its bearing on the re- 
lation of the sin of the race to that of our great ancestor, and 
inquire into its teachiug on the subject of imputation. Of 
course, some other topics will be incidentally discussed, while 
on themes which have filled volumes of controversy much 
must be briefly noticed or passed over altogether. 

We may best approach the discussion by glancing at the 
previous course of thought in the epistle. The opening chap- 
ter (at verse 17) announces as its grand thesis, a justifying 
righteousness from God, provided for man through faith. 
Three successive chapters set forth the necessity of this right- 
eousness by portraying that universal human wickedness which 
exposes the entire race to the wrath of God, and renders justi- 
fication through law for Gentile and Jew alike impossible. 
The close of chapter third (verses 21-31) reintroduces with 
emphasis the remedy for the disease that has been so vividly 
portrayed, viz., redemption through the propitiatory sacrifice 
of Christ ; and the fourth chapter confirms this doctrine of 
faith from the Old Testament examples of Abraham and 
David. The necessity, nature, and harmony with the Script- 
ures of this justification having been shown, the apostle pro- 
ceeds, in chapter five, to develop its results under the two 
grand aspects: first, of peace with God — an adjustment of 
the otherwise unappeasable strife between God and man ; 
and, secondly, of a hope, assured by God's already manifested 
mercy (verses 5-8), of a future inheritance of bliss, and a con- 



ADAM AND CHRIST. 185 

summation of grace in glory (verses 9, 11). Under the inspi- 
ration of his theme the apostle exclaims, " And not only so, 
but we triumph in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through 
whom we have now " (as against the coming glory) "received 
the reconciliation." 

At this stage of the discussion, the reconciling to God of a 
race with whom he was before at enmity ; the quenching of 
his fiery wrath ; the breaking in through the rent and retreat- 
ing clouds of the blessed beams of grace and glory ; and all 
through the obedience and sacrifice of a single man who thus 
becomes a new head and starting point to the race — there 
naturally, and to one at home in Old Testament history, al- 
most inevitably suggests itself a parallel between this universal 
deliverance and salvation — universal in potency and intrinsic 
adaptation — wrought by the obedience of one man, and the 
universal sin and wrath entailed by the disobedience of 
another. The two personages, Adam and Christ, stand, to the 
most superficial eye, in marked relation both of similarity and 
contrast ; and their respective acts form the two great crises 
and turning points — the strophe and the anti-strophe — 
in the terribly real and significant drama of human destiny. 

Here then, the apostle pauses in his direct track of thought. 
For no purpose of nice theological distinction, but having his 
mind filled with the wrath delineated in the preceding pages 
and the glorious reconciliation now opening through Jesus 
Christ, he starts spontaneously on a parallel, partly of resem- 
blance, partly of contrast, between the two great heads of hu- 
manity, and their respective wprks of ruin and restoration. 
" For this cause, just as through one man sin entered into the 
world, and death through sin, and so death came through (or 
abroad) unto all men in that all sinned," so — it is easy to fill 



186 SIN AND DEATH IN ADAM AND THE It ACE. 

out the parallel ; the corresponding members of the compari- 
son readily suggest themselves — " so through one man right- 
eousness entered into the world, and life by righteousness," or 
something to that effect. But the phrase, " in that all sinned," 
suggesting (as at 2 : 14) the seeming paradox of sin in the ab- 
sence of law, led the apostle to leave his sentence unfinished, 
and turning away to certain illustrative ideas, to abandon the 
formal completion of his parallel, and return to it only in a 
modified form, first at verse 14, " who is type of him that was 
to come," the future Adam ; and again — after introducing the 
points of contrast — more fully and formally at verse 18. I 
stop now at the brief clause on which I have undertaken to 
comment, and which becomes the pivot of my discussion — 
" in that all have sinned." 

First, briefly, in regard to the translation. Some have ren- 
dered it " in whom all sinned," referring the relative " whom " 
back to Adam as its antecedent. But this construction is in 
reference to the import of the preposition intolerably harsh, 
and by the remoteness of the pronoun from the assumed ante- 
cedent, grammatically impossible. Another construction refers 
the relative back to " death " (Odvaroq), as its antecedent, " on 
condition of which all sinned," a construction also harsh, and 
required by no exigencies of the passage. Calvin and Me- 
lancthon convert " in that all sinned " into " in that all were 
sinners," in the sense of " inherited a propagated evil nature." 
Whatever the truth or falseness of the doctrine, the transla- 
tion is certainly erroneous, for only the loosest philology 
could turn the absolute aorist " sinned " (or possibly " had 
sinned ") into " were " (by inheritance) " sinners." Grotius' 
explanation " to pay the penalty of sin " (luere pamas) is, if 
possible, still less defensible. 



THE PHRASE RENDERED. 187 

The only natural and probable rendering makes ly $ 
equivalent to £n\ toutu) ore, and renders, with our English 
version, in that, nearly, because that, or possibly, under the 
condition that. Thus the exactest rendering of the phrase is 
" in that all sinned," referring most naturally to some single 
phrase to which the term applies. I add that while the Greek 
aorist means in itself simply " sinned," as an absolutely past 
act, Greek usage might employ it of an act relatively past — 
i. e., of an act' prior to the time expressed by the accompany- 
ing verb, where English idiom would require the pluperfect. 
This is especially true when the aorist is, as here, dependent 
on a relative. The phrase might, therefore, if the connection 
required it, be rendered, " in that all had sinned." This 
meaning never lies in the tense, but only in the connection, 
and can be admitted, therefore, only as an exigency of the 
context. Take in illustration (with the relative) Matthew 
27 : 60, " placed in his sepulchre which he had hewed " (Greek 
llaroirrfitv, literally, he hewed). So (without a preceding 
relative) Matthew 14 : 3, l^avj, had bound; literally "bound," 
but referring to a relatively prior act. So much for the read- 
ing of the passage ; let us proceed to its interpretation. 

Aside from the above-mentioned interpretations of Calvin 
and Grotius (which need not detain us), we may resolve the 
interpretations of the passage chiefly into the three following : 

I. They sinned putatively, or by imputation, in having the 
transgression of Adam directly reckoned to them, or passed 
over to their account by virtue of a covenant relation. 

II. They sinned virtually, in that by their natural constitu- 
tion they were in Adam, and so fell with him. 

III. They sinned personally and individually, in that 
through and in consequence of the sin of Adam, sin and its 



188 SIN AND DEATH IN ADAM AND THE RACE. 

penalty, death, originating with him, passed through the race, 
involving every member of it in the guilt and penalty of per- 
sonal transgression. 

Is the doctrine then that of constructive or imputed sin, 
through Adam's federal or covenant headship to the race, or 
that of virtual sin through Adam's organic and vital headship 
of the race, or that of actual and personal sin of every mem- 
ber of the race in consequence of his descent from a sinning 
and depraved ancestor, and his vital and essential relation- 
ship to him ? 

The natural interpretation which an unbiassed reader, who 
was not seeking proof of a dogma, would put upon the phrase, 
would seem to be the latter. Up to this point he has found 
nothing in the epistle that would suggest any other sense 
than that which lies on the face of the words, viz., the actual 
sin, accompanying and conditioning the actual death of every 
man. He might, indeed, conceive a very material difference 
between the position of Adam and that of his descendants ; 
his sin may, by a divine constitution, stand in a vital and 
causative relation to the sins of all his posterity ; but this 
would in no way interfere with the apostle's assertion of uni- 
versal individual sin, and of universal death as its invariable 
concomitant. The statement would seem to be that as sin and 
death came into the world through Adam, so together they 
went abroad and struck all his descendants, the sin being in 
each case as actual and personal as was the death. Yet we 
need not say that the most obvious explanation of a passage is 
not always the true one. Latent and subtle considerations 
clinging about its roots sometimes compel us to reject the 
meaning which lies upon its face. Are there such considera- 
tions here ? What reasons here present themselves that re- 



THE DOCTRINE OF IMPUTATION. 139 

quire us to substitute for the personal sin which the apostle 
seems to affirm, and upon which he has hitherto dwelt with 
solemu emphasis, an imputed or constructive sinning in the 
transgression of their great progenitor ? If I mistake not, the 
reasons alleged by the advocates of the putative doctrine ai e 
reducible substantially to three. 

1. The imputation doctrine, they allege, is required by the 
strictness of the parallel. The apostle, it is claimed, having 
set forth the wickedness and ruin of mankind, and their recov- 
ery through Christ, now proceeds to illustrate the method of 
this recovery through the imputed righteousness of the Re- 
deemer, and in so doing places him as the formal counterpart 
and antitype of Adam in whom was wrought their ruin. The 
parallel, therefore, must be substantially exact. But the 
spiritual seed of the second Adam are saved, not by their 
personal, but by his imputed righteousness ; the natural seed, 
therefore, of the first Adam must, in like manner, be lost, not 
by their personal, but by his imputed sin. If the death is in 
the one case the product of actual sin, and the life in the other 
the product of imputed righteousness, the comparison limps, 
and the reasoning is inconsequent. Christ stands in covenant 
relation to his people ; he suffered and died as their represent- 
ative ; his sufferings inure to their benefit, and the righteous- 
ness which he wrought out is passed over to their account. 
The converse of this must hold in the case of Adam. He 
must stand as the federal head and representative of the race ; 
not merely as its organic head, so that the results of his act 
pass to his descendants by natural propagation, but as a cov- 
enant head, so that his acts are constructively theirs ; and so 
that, independently of what they are and do, personallv, as 
they take their places on the stage of action, they are already, 



190 SIX AND DEATH IN ADAM AND THE EACE. 

in the purpose of omniscience, charged with the virtual guilt 
of their head and representative. 

2. A corroboration of this view its advocates find in the 
immediately following language : " For until the law, sin was 
in the world ; but sin is not imputed where there is no law." 
This language can have no force, it is claimed, except as a 
proof that the sin for which men suffered death was the sin 
of Adam. If, before the law — in the interval, that is, 
between the law of Paradise and the law of Sinai — sin was 
actually in the world, — and yet sin is not reckoned or imputed 
in the absence of law, — then the only sin which was the ground 
of the death of men must have been the sin of Adam 
imputed to his posterity; and the purpose of the apostle 
here is to prove the doctrine of imputed sin in order to estab- 
lish and make good his parallel between Adam and Christ. 

3. Still a third reason for the doctrine is found in the fact 
that death reigns over a large portion of the race who have 
never been implicated in personal sin, and cannot, therefore, 
be for that reason subject to death. Infants do not sin, and 
yet infants die. To this class many commentators, and 
among them Dr. Hodge, refer the expression of verse 14 : 
" Who did not sin after the similitude of Adam's transgres- 
sion." And, at all events, as the sufferings and death of 
infants, and perhaps of idiots, cannot be chargeable on 
their personal sinfulness, they can come only through the 
transferred criminality of the covenant head of the race. 

These reasons seem plausible, and at first view, perhaps 
convincing. Let us see if they will bear the test of careful 
examination. 

The first of the three turns on the parallel run by the 
apostle between Adam and Christ, and finds in the necessary 



AN ASSUMED PAHALLEL. 191 

correspondence of the two terras of the parallel, an argument 
for imputed sin. The righteousness of Christ, it argues, is 
imputed to his spiritual seed unto life. The sin of Adam, 
therefore, must be imputed to his natural seed unto death. 
But can this reasoning be regarded as conclusive or really 
weighty ? Does it not push the parallel beyond its real pur- 
pose? It seems quite gratuitous to assume that this purpose 
extends to the precise mode of operation of the acts of the 
two personages who are contrasted ; to the precise way and 
manner in which their acts affected their respective subjects. 
The broad and general terms of the parallel forbid such a 
supposition. The obvious purpose of the introduction of the 
parallel equally forbids it. We have simply Adam and 
Christ at the head of two lines of development ; at the source 
and fountain head of two grand streams of influence, the one 
disobedience of Adam bringing in upon the race evil and 
ruin, the one obedience of Christ originating over against it 
righteousness and life. That the precise rationale of the two 
systems was in the apostle's mind to be exhibited, there seems 
no manner of evidence. It seems to me that the character 
of the entire passage, extending from verse 12 to the end of 
the chapter, is totally misconceived when regarded in the 
light of a piece of strictly dogmatical teaching. That it is 
fraught with great and superlatively important truths fol- 
lows from its being a product of the profound and divinely 
inspired intellect of the apostle. But any subtle refining on 
the way in which the agency of either Adam or Christ has 
produced its effects, seems entirely out of keeping with the 
general character of the passage. Regarded in its just light, 
it is more nearly an outburst of enthusiastic triumph over 
the contemplation of the ruin entailed upon humanity by 



192 SIN AND DEATH IN ADAM AND THE RACE. 

the first Adam gloriously retrieved by the Second. It is a 
sort of epinician hymn, a grand lyrical chant; the jubilant 
exultation of humanity, bursting from the lips of that great 
apostle who, more widely than any other living man, had 
surveyed the extent and fathomed the depth of the desola- 
tion, and more zealously and successfully than any other had 
labored to retrieve it. Look at the position of the passage, 
and it will be found wholly alien to the niceties of theologi- 
cal detail. The apostle has drawn out in dark and fearful 
lines the picture of human wickedness and ruin. Over 
against that picture he has portrayed briefly, but vividly, 
redemption with its present reconcilement and its prospective 
glory ; and now, as one who has emerged from a perilous 
wilderness into a scene of safety and beauty, he turns back 
to recall the horrors he has escaped, and to contrast the 
blessed agency that has wrought his deliverance with the act 
and author of his ruin. 

This, I am satisfied, presents the only right point of view 
from which to estimate our passage. It is, in a much higher 
degree, emotional than doctrinal, though, like all the 
apostle's emotional utterances, pervaded by the weightiest 
truth. What, we may ask, more natural and more likely to 
be formed than such a contrast at this stage of the discus- 
sion? 

We have traced briefly the course of that discussion. The 
earth, to the apostle's anointed eye, reeking with wickedness ; 
the heavens black with wrath. The picture has no softening 
hues, it is one of unrelieved and terrible blackness ; but 
there bursts on the scene a divine light. The clouds disperse, 
the lightnings cease, and peace and hope succeed to enmity 
and despair. How natural now to illustrate and enhance the 



AN INEVITABLE COMPARISON. 193 

greatness of the deliverance and the Deliverer, by bringing 
tbem into parallel with the extent and the author of the 
ruin ! And to the student of the Hebrew Scriptures the 
comparison was inevitable. The analogy of the two cases 
was too remarkable to escape notice, and in no more effective 
way could the apostle give vent to his struggling emotions, 
and heighten his readers' conceptions both of the richness of 
the benefit and their indebtedness to its author. His eye has 
swept over the ages of human sin, and seen its thousand widen- 
ing lines converge in the single transgression of Adam. It 
sweeps over the equally wide range and still deeper potencies 
of redemption, and sees them all converge in the single 
obedience of Christ. How natural then the parallel, with- 
out assuming any specific doctrinal purpose or any theologi- 
cal subtleties alien to its general spirit ! I say alien to its 
spirit, for the mode of carrying out the parallel indicates no 
distinctive doctrinal purpose. The expressions are broad and 
general, and the entire exigencies of the passage are met by 
assuming simply a causative relation between the disobedience 
of Adam and the obedience of Christ on the one hand, and 
their respective results in ruin and deliverance on the other. 
There is not an expression which a rejecter of the form of 
imputation supposed to be here taught need hesitate to employ, 
or which would stumble any believer in the general fact that 
the transgression of Adam brought sin and death into the 
world, and entailed them upon the race. The parallel is 
carried out rather rhetorically than in strict logical statement. 
The resemblance is. briefly hurried over, while in delineating 
the contrast, the advantage which the dispensation of life has 
over the dispensation of death, the writer lingers over the 
topic, kaleidoscopically throwing out essentially the same 
R 



194 SIN AND DEATH IN ADAM AND THE EACE. 

thought in different forms (verses 15-18), as if struggling to 
express the transcendent richness of the gospel. 

There is no need then that the comparison creep on all fours. 
That Adam and Christ stand in like general relation meets 
abundantly the apostle's purpose. Believers receive salvation 
through Christ's righteousness, yet it by no means follows that 
we share the consequences of Adam's sin in precisely the same 
way. The consequences themselves, with the fact of their re- 
lation to Adam, is all that is necessarily implied. That, 
standing at the head of the race, his act determined its char- 
acter and destiny ; that he sinned, and in that sin opened the 
flood-gates of a tide of death that has swept over all his pos- 
terity ; that, in turn, the sacrifice of our Lord in voluntary obe- 
dience opened an equally wide door of life and salvation, and 
one never to be closed ; that in the blood of Calvary has welled 
up a healing current deeper, broader, mightier than the deso- 
lating stream which has issued from Eden — these great facts 
embrace substantially the teaching of our passage. 

And even were a closer correspondence demanded, is it clear 
that the advantage would be with the advocates of imputa- 
tion. Following the analogy of Romans 4 : 9, we should say 
not that it is Christ's righteousness, but the believer's faith, 
that is imputed to him for righteousness. But leaving this 
aside, and granting imputation (Xoy&adat, reckoning) some- 
thing more than a mere figurative statement of our justifica- 
tion through Christ, none can claim that Christ's righteousness 
is imputed to the believer as a substitute for, and dispensation 
from his own personal righteousness. Into the work of Christ 
he must enter with personal sympathy and personal appropri- 
ation, making his own the spirit of his Lord's sacrifice, and 
reflecting in his own character his holiness. God reckons 



A SECOND ARGUMENT. 195 

righteousness to no one who is not in some degree personally- 
righteous, and, so far as it is imputed, it is a righteousness 
rather for Christ's sake, than Christ's own proper righteousness. 
But at all events, there can, in the nature of the case, be no 
perfect parallel between the two — between the work of ruin 
wrought humanly by a man, and the work of restoration 
wrought preternaturally through the co-working of the human 
with the divine. It would be almost blasphemy — it is cer- 
tainly unwarrantable — to reduce them to precisely the same 
measure, and force them into the same categories. I think it 
safe to say that any precise identification of the manner in 
which Adam's and Christ's agency wrought upon the world is 
not at all in the apostle's thought. 

2. The second argument for imputation is found in the 
words, " Until the law, sin was in the world ; but sin is not 
reckoned where there is no law." From this it is urged that 
the sin which existed during the ante-legal period could have 
been no other than the imputed sin of Adam. But is this a 
legitimate inference ? Do not the writings of the apostle ne- 
cessitate a very different conclusion ? If previously to the 
Mosaic law, sin was'in the world, and yet sin is not reckoned 
in the absence of law, what is the conclusion ? That the ab- 
sence of law was apparent rather than real, relative rather than 
absolute ; that though the positive law of Paradise had ceased, 
and that of Sinai had not been given, yet enough of essential 
law remained among men to bring upon them accountability 
and, if violated, condemnation. This explanation has the ad- 
vantage of harmonizing both with the unquestionable facts, and 
with the prior teaching of the apostle. In chapter one of our 
epistle he tells us that God had made in the creation such a 
revelation of his power and divinity as to leave the Gentiles, 



196 SIN AND DEATH IN ADAM AND THE RACE. 

who ignored them, without excuse. In the second chapter he 
tells us that they who sin without law will perish without law, 
and presently, to explain how this may be, he tells us that 
Gentiles who have not a formal law have the substance of the 
law (its epynv in distinction from its ypd/1/j.a) written on their 
inner nature, to whose demands their conscience bears perpetual 
testimony, and before which their moral estimates (Xoyta/xoi) 
are engaged in perpetual processes of accusation and defense. 
Verses fourteen and fifteen of this second chapter are thus a 
parenthetical aside, to show how, by their possession of an 
inner law of conscience, the Gentiles can be brought into the 
category of those who will be visited with the impartial sen- 
tence of the law. Such is the clear testimony of the apostle 
in the opening chapters of the epistle. He has brought for- 
ward distinctly the light of nature and the law of conscience as 
the ground of that terrible arraignment which he has made of 
the Gentile world for the foulest wickedness. And is it con- 
ceivable that he has now directly crossed the track of those 
reiterated and solemn utterances ? Can he so soon have for- 
gotten the long catalogue of personal crimes branded into his 
page with a pen of iron, and his own clear -explanations of this 
personal criminality, as now to tell us that in the long inter- 
legal period between Paradise and Sinai, the sin that was in 
the world was only the imputed transgression of the father of 
the race ? Which then, is the more natural way of filling out 
the elliptical argument : " Until the positive law of Sinai, sin 
was in the world ; but sin is not reckoned in the absence of 
law, therefore the sin was exclusively the sin of Adam ? " Or 
thus : " Until the positive law of Sinai, sin was in the world ; 
but sin is not reckoned in the absence of law; therefore even 
before that positive law there was a law of nature and con- 



ANOTHER RENDERING. 197 

science, which men could and did violate, and in standing 
proof of which we behold during all this period the sovereign 
sway of death?" Which better harmonizes both with the 
facts and with the explicitly recorded doctrine of the apostle ? 

But thus much granting the correctness of this rendering. 
Of that, however, I greatly doubt, and incline to one that 
seems to me more in accordance both with the probable im- 
port of the word and the scope of the apostle. The word here 
rendered reckon or impute, is not the same precisely as that else- 
where so rendered, viz.. kuyiZeadai. It is both for classic and 
New Testament use nearly an anas Xey6p.svov f — a reckoning once 
for all — (viz., iXXoysledai or kXXoyd.adat), and may, I think, with 
great probability, be rendered be {formally) set to the account 
of, be brought into strict reckoning. Thus .the idea is changed 
from this, that in the absolute absence of law there is an absolute 
non-imputation of sin, — an idea, indeed, perfectly Pauline, — 
to another equally Pauline, viz., that in the relative absence 
of the law, sin is not held to its full and rigid accountability. 
Thus it corresponds with the apostle's declaration to the 
Athenians (Acts 17) of God's overlooking {p7csptdwv, " wink- 
ing at ") the times of the world's ignorance, and also in this 
very epistle, with the declaration of that " forbearance (avo/yj, 
holding back) of God " which has passed by the sins of former 
ages. (3 : 25, 26.) 

This meaning, moreover, seems to fall into harmony with 
the context, and to shed a better light upon it than does the 
other, though this in itself is equally unexceptionable. Let 
us glance at the course of thought : " Death passed through," 
says the apostle, " unto all men, in that all sinned." Instead 
of finishing his parallel the writer (for nearly precisely the 
same reason as at chapter 2 : 13) checks himself. To a Jew, 



198 SIN AND DEATH IN ADAM AND THE RACE. 

to whom the legislation of Sinai was a thing so intensely and 
tremendously real, the condition of nations without law 
would be a sore puzzle. How the nations without law could 
stand on the same general platform of moral accountability 
with the favored possessor of law he would find it difficult to 
understand. Hence at chapter 2, when the apostle has 
declared that the "doers of law will be justified," he turns 
aside for a moment to show how the Gentiles could be 
brought into the class to whom this criterion of judgment 
should be applied. So here the declaration that " all sinned " 
in connection with the prevalence of death, suggests if it does 
not demand, explanation. The writer, therefore, breaks off 
abruptly, adding, " For until law sin was in the world," viz., 
as the fruit and manifestation of the general depravity ; as 
the violation of that inherent moral law from which none 
can escape ; and although during this inter-legal period less 
aggravated in dye, and naturally held to less rigid accounta- 
bility, and brought to less strict reckoning, yet there was 
during this period, one standing judgment upon it, viz., the 
fact and sovereign sway of death. Other judgments might 
be held in abeyance; but what had been the original and 
specific penalty of sin was inflicted with unrelaxed vigor. 
Death held regal sway (ifiafftteuaev) from Adam to Moses, 
not touching the race sporadically, not asserting a disputed 
and doubtful sway, but holding high carnival, reigning even 
over all the generations which, while they sinned, did not, 
like Adam, sin in the face of positive enactment. 

Such, I think, to be the scope of this very condensed pas- 
sage. The apostle has to touch the moral history of human- 
ity under its two conditions, as without law and under law. 
In the former state sin was in the world, but rather, com- 



SIN, AND TRAESGKESSION. 199 

paratively speaking, as sin than as transgression ; rather as 
the spontaneous, irrepressible, half-unconscious outflowing of 
inherited and inherent depravity, than as conscious, volun- 
tary, deliberate violation of law. Hence, during this period, 
the judgments of God comparatively slumber; he deals with 
its developments tenderly and indulgently. Yet evidences 
both of the ruin and of God's displeasure are not wanting. 
Death, its original companion and penalty still, continues, 
and by his awful and exceptionless ravages attests the viru- 
lence of the evil even in its most mitigated form. Under 
this aspect of the case, considering human sin under its 
purely natural manifestation, the apostle deals with the evil 
and the remedy till he reaches the climax of his powers of 
portraiture (verse 18). He then advances to the next stage 
of development : " But law came in alongside (izapd) that 
the trespass might be heightened." The law was introduced 
in order to deepen sin into transgression ; to aggravate and 
bring to a crisis the moral disease of humanity ; and by 
showing the virulence and obstinacy of the disease to prepare 
the way for the remedy. The law was thus an advancing 
stage of preparation for the gospel. It was not promulgated 
with the expectation that it would be obeyed, nor, if we may 
so speak, in order that it might be obeyed. It was added 
(repofferiOTj) in the interest {xdpiv) of transgressions (Gal. 3 : 
19). It was, therefore, by a merciful synchronism that the 
moral and the ritual code were introduced together ; the one 
telling of human guilt, the other of a divine redemption ; the 
one proclaiming the need, the other the possibility, of salva- 
tion ; the one fulminating wrath, the other whispering pardon. 
We may think slightingly of Jewish ritualism, but it was 
humanity's blessed hope and solace in the long interval 



200 SIN AND DEATH IN ADAM AND THE EACE. 

between Moses and Christ. Happy that the lightnings which 
blazed from Sinai were partially quenched if but in the blood 
of a symbolical expiation ! 

But to return from this digression. I add that the phrase 
" over them that did not sin after the similitude of Adam's 
transgression," makes against the doctrine of imputation. The 
very statement that they did not sin " after the likeness of 
Adam's transgression" — i. e., under some special form or 
conditions, yet implies that they did sin, though in a different 
way. What was that way we can not reasonably doubt. 
Sinning after the likeness of Adam's transgression was sin- 
ning in violation of express and positive law ; and thus the 
phrase simply describes those who sinned during the inter- 
legal period. The word " even " or " also " (xa() may either 
contrast that portion of Adam's descendants who never 
enjoyed positive law with such as from time to time received 
special divine communications, or contrast the race as a 
whole, regarded as without law, with Adam, making no 
account of special cases of exception. The argument is, in 
either case, the same, though I think the latter view, which 
takes the race collectively, the more probable. At all events, 
there is no ground whatever for supposing a reference to 
infants ; and the very declaration that the class referred to 
did not sin in a particular way, carries with it the nearly 
necessary implication that they did sin. 

The argument then for imputation from the phrase, " For 
until the law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed 
where there is no law," falls to the ground. It is discount- 
enanced by the direct assertion that sin was in the world, 
with nothing to show that it means other than what it says ; 
by the implication of their sinning contained in the fact of 



THE COUESE OF THE ARGUMENT. 201 

their not sinning in a particular manner ; by the tenor of the 
reasoning ; by the apostle's previous teaching that the Gen- 
tiles possessed and violated the twofold law of nature and of 
conscience (1 : 18-22 ; 2 : 14, 15), and, I may add, by the 
whole tenor of his previous doctrine. If there is any one 
truth which he has illustrated with prominent fullness and 
which shines out with noonday clearness on the preceding 
pages of the epistle, it is the wrath of God resting upon man for 
his actual and universal wickedness. From the majestic open- 
ing, " For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against 
all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men," down to the 
solemn closing of the case with the arraignment of " all the 
world " as " guilty before God," the apostle has never hesi- 
tated, never wavered in his indictment of humanity for un- 
provoked and inexcusable sin. No shadow of intimation 
that the absence of law placed man beyond the imputation 
of personal guilt. No hint that for anything other than his 
personal criminality he stands obnoxious to the wrath of 
heaven. The Gentile has willfully suppressed the truth ; has 
refused his homage to the divinity that shines in creation 
and providence ; and from this starting point of impiety has 
plunged into beastly and abominable vices, being filled with 
unrighteousness, maliciousness, covetousness, and so on 
through a catalogue of crimes of which humanity shudders at 
the recital. Nowhere one moment's hesitation about the 
reality, the malignity, the damning desert of personal sin ! 
And now are we to believe that he turns around and tells us 
that the world was suffering only or mainly from imputed 
and constructive guilt? Has such a new light suddenly 
dawned upon the apostle, has he so completely forgotten the 
reiterated testimony of the preceding pages, that he shrinks 



202 SIN AND DEATH IN ADAM AND THE RACE. 

from the simple declaration that " all sinned," and finds it 
necessary to sustain the charge by laying to their door the 
crime of a representative progenitor ? Never was uttered a 
more palpable absurdity ; never was there a more complete 
anti-climax than this final reducing of these accumulated 
charges of human wickedness to a mere constructive liability 
for the single trespass of Adam. Of course no man will 
consistently carry out so absurd a proposition. None will 
deny that in the absence of law men are actual, as well as 
constructive, sinners. They will, in fact, only claim that 
men are subject to penal sufferings which flow from their 
federal connection with Adam. Yet they then surrender the 
doctrine in question as matter of history, holding it merely 
as a tenet' of theological belief. 

And read, for a moment, in the light of history this doc- 
trine of mere imputed sin. Take the story of Cain — the drama 
of post-paradisaic life, opening with envy, hate, murder, 
and falsehood ; the Deluge, when the earth was filled with 
violence, and all flesh had corrupted its way until its reeking 
iniquities demanded that terrible purgation ; Sodom and 
Gomorrah buried by their loathsome vices under a storm of 
fire and brimstone ; Pharaoh hardening his heart until God 
plunged him and his host into the abyss of waters; the 
Canaanites swept away for their ripened iniquities before 
invading Israel — and then tell us that during this long inter- 
regnum of law personal sin was not, and could not be, justly 
imputed, and that irresponsible humanity was simply expiat- 
ing the guilt of the primal transgression ! 

But do not facts such as I have mentioned, the examples 
of the Deluge, of Sodom and Gomorrah, and of Pharaoh, 
make against my own interpretation of the kXloys'trai i and 



A THIRD REASON. 203 

prove that God did watch over and bring the sins of men to 
a terrible reckoning ? I answer that all such statements must 
be taken as only relative. Comparatively speaking, human 
sin is but light in the absence of enacted law. Comparatively 
speaking, theft, falsehood, fornication, are — the Old Testa- 
ment being witness — but venial crimes, apart from express 
Divine prohibition. And, comparatively speaking, the visita- 
tions of God's wrath on crimes so committed are but slight 
and occasional. Now and then the heavens mutter with sup- 
pressed and half-sleeping vengeance ; now and then a fierce 
local and transient eruption testifies to the wrath that lies 
treasured below. But, as a rule, the times of ignorance God 
" winks at " (pTzepopa, overlooks), and leaves only inexorable 
and all-embracing death as the abiding evidence of existing 
wrath and pledge of a coming judgment. 

3. A third reason assigned for the interpretation we are 
examining is the case of infants. Infants do not sin, yet 
infants die ; their death, therefore, along with whatever other 
evils they suffer, must be from the imputation of the sin of 
Adam. Now that infants suffer and die on account of the sin 
of Adam is just as indisputable as that the sins and death of 
all men are attributable to this same origin. Yet it does not 
thence necessarily follow that infants suffer and die on account 
of the imputing to them of their great ancestor's transgression. 
Their organic connection with Adam may furnish a satis- 
factory explanation of the facts. And the case of infants 
needs here, no more than elsewhere, any separate considera- 
tion. They are bound up with the race ; they partake its 
character and destinies. They have within them that seed of 
depravity which only needs scope to germinate and ripen into 
sin. They belong to a stock which, not merely by a con- 



204 SIX AND DEATH IN ADAM AND THE EACE. 

structive participation in a single act, but far more by an 
actual vitiation derived from an organic connection with it, 
rests under the penal curse of death. As, then, the apostle, 
in all his previous discussion, while charging men with the 
guilt of sin, needed to make no special reference to infants, so 
no such reference is needed here. With whatever is excep- 
tional in the case of infants, God is abundantly competent to 
deal, and the practical discussion, of the facts that lie within 
the sphere of human consciousness and responsibility need not 
be embarrassed by problems that lie beyond human solution. 
Besides, it should be remembered that if the death of 
infants has its hard and penal, it has also its gracious side. 
If it may be looked upon as the penalty of inherited 
depravity, it must also be recognized as an arrest of the 
development of that depravity into actual transgression. 
And here we may find logical assurance of infant salvation. 
Death, with its attendant evils, is the penalty of sin — pri- 
marily and properly of actual sin. If, therefore, in the case 
of a race placed under an economy of mercy, God has selected 
a certain portion on whom the penalty is visited without their 
having participated in the actual sin which originally incurred 
it, we may fairly infer that the penalty itself loses in their 
case its proper character, and is transmuted into a blessing. 
When by providential interference God arrests the develop- 
ment of the innate germ of evil, and prevents it from advanc- 
ing into conscious sin, we may take for granted that it is in 
mercy and not in wrath ; that the penalty itself is correspond- 
ingly modified ; and that death to the infant, as well as to the 
believer, is shorn of its terrors, and becomes a minister of 
good. It is a part, and no unimportant part, of that broad 
economy by which God is counteracting and hemming in the 



INFANT SALVATION. 205 

ravages of the curse. There thus became, we may believe, 
two classes to whom belongs, without exception, the kingdom 
of heaven ; the one that of those who accept in intelligent faith 
the gracious proffer of redemption ; the other that vast multi- 
tude who open a feeble eye upon the light and sorrows of earth, 
and at once exchange their infant wail for the glad harmonies 
of heaven. We may regard this belief as no mere matter 
of affectionate hope or groundless conjecture. Though incapa- 
ble of strict proof, it seems rational to believe that where the 
natural relation between the cause and the effect, between sin 
and death, has been broken, and the cause has not been 
allowed its normal action, the penalty also loses its. proper 
character and death, with the infant as with the believer, and 
in both cases, through the blood of Christ, is disarmed of its 
sting. 

The bearing of the phrase, "who sinned not after the 
similitude of Adam's transgression," has been already con- 
sidered. The opinion that it has any direct reference to 
infants is scarcely deserving of serious refutation. It so 
exactly describes the class that sinned without positive law, 
and so plainly intimates that the very class referred to did sin, 
that any reference to infants seems entirely out of the question, 
and except through dogmatic exigencies would scarcely be 
thought of for a moment. 

4. Still a fourth argument, however, for the imputation doc- 
trine is adduced by Meyer, viz., the Apostle Paul's decla- 
ration in 1 Cor. 15 : 22, that " in Adam all die " ; inasmuch 
as consistency requires that if we hold that all die in Adam, 
we must, in like manner, maintain that in Adam all sin. 
In any proper sense of the expression this may be readily 
conceded. But surely the apostle does hot mean to affirm 
s 



206 SIX AND DEATH IX ADAM AND THE RACE. 

that the death of Adam was imputed to his descendants, so 
that their death is any less actual and real than his own. 
Nor, I believe, does the apostle mean here that the death of 
Adam was the virtual death of his descendants — however true 
this may be — so that when he died it was as if the race died. 
Nor certainly can he mean that the death of Adam was the 
cause of death to his posterity, so that they die by reason of 
his death. " In Adam all die " seems simply a brief, emphatic 
declaration that the sin of Adam brought death upon the 
race ; we all die in Adam only as his transgression subjected 
his posterity, along with himself, to the death which was its 
penalty. Properly interpreted, the passage has nothing what- 
ever to do with imputation. It simply tells us that as we owe 
to one man our death, so to one man we owe also our resur- 
rection. 

II. Dismissing then as alien to the passage, the doctrine 
of imputed sin, what shall we say of the interpretation which 
makes it affirm that all men sinned in Adam, not putatively 
and by construction, but virtually and essentially; not by 
virtue of a mere federal or covenant, but of an orgauic, 
relation between Adam and his posterity? Mankind, this 
doctrine alleges, sinned in Adam, because Adam was man- 
kind. The human race lay in the loins of their great pro- 
genitor, and shared in his transgression, as Levi in the loins 
of Abraham paid tithes to Melchizedek. Thus Adam's obe- 
dience, while he obeyed, was the obedience of the race ; his 
trespass, when he fell, was the trespass of the race. In his 
crime all crimes were potentially contained. In his fall the 
stream of humanity was poisoned at the fountain head. The 
vitiated source could send forth only impure waters; the 
corrupted tree could bear only bitter fruit. 



PELAGIANISM SUPERFICIAL. 207 

This doctrine of our relation to Adam, and this rationale 
of man's universal depravity, seems to be the only right one. 
Nothing less than such a vital connection with Adam — such 
a physiological law by which the characteristics of Adam, 
both physical and moral, were propagated to his descendants 
— can explain the absolute and exceptionless prevalence of 
moral evil among men ; the remorseless and inexorable 
tenacity with which the taint of sin has clung to all forms 
and stages of human development, making each individual 
stain of guilt but a rill from a bottomless and shoreless ocean. 
Pelagianism, which makes every man substantially his own 
Adam, and puts human nature with every individual on a 
fresh trial ; the doctrine that sin is a casual act and not a 
fixed nature, a "local malady" and not a "constitutional 
taint," and can be dealt with by any process less radical than 
a divine regeneration, is pitiably superficial and blind to the 
formidableness of our great foe. Leviathan laughs at the 
impotent arrows that rebound from his iron scales ; the swell- 
ing Atlantic scoffs at the broom which would sweep back its 
wrathful billows ; but infinitely more sin mocks at the hostile 
weapon that is not tempered with a divine energy, and drawn 
from the armory of heaven. 

But this doctrine, true and just in itself, is yet not the 
doctrine of our passage. That Paul held such a view of our 
connection with Adam, and that it really underlies his con- 
ceptions of the prevalence of evil, we may well believe. But 
there seems no evidence that he intends to propound it here. 
He is not here concerning himself with any theory of the way 
in which our sinfulness is derived from Adam. The dreadful 
fad of that sinfulness is that with which he has all along been 
dealing, and there is no reason for supposing that he departs 



208 SIN AND DEATH IN ADAM AND THE RACE. 

from it here. The single thought here added is that this sin- 
fulness is entailed upon us by the act of Adam — how entailed 
it does not lie within his purpose to declare. That he is still 
speaking of personal sin is shown by the words, " for until the 
law sin was in the world," which can have no other natural 
application than to sin existing in the individual members of 
the race. 

III. The only right answer then to the question, "How 
did all sin " ? is that they sinned personally and individually. 
This is the single point of view under which, previously or 
subsequently, the apostle contemplates sin, and nothing either 
in the passage or the context implies its relinquishment here. 
The epistle deals everywhere with the broad, obvious facts of 
man's actual condition. It takes the phases of human guilt 
and wickedness that are palpable to observation. Pausing at 
one point for a moment (2 : 14, 15) to explain how the exist- 
ence of sin was compatible with the absence of positive law, 
it pursues its steady course of unwavering affirmation of uni- 
versal human wickedness. " We have before proved both 
Jews and Gentiles that they are all under sin." " That every 
mouth may be stopped, and all the world become arraignable 
before God." " For all have sinned and have come short of 
the glory of God." In this latter passage all commentators 
understand the words of personal sin, yet no objection can be 
urged against this understanding in the fifth chapter that does 
not apply equally in the third If Paul could affirm universal 
sinning without regard to the sinning by exceptional cases of 
infants and idiots in the third chapter, he can do so equally 
in the fifth, and in neither does any thought of these classes 
limit, or need to limit, the universality of his charge. What- 
ever is exceptional in these cases will be dealt with excep- 



A QUESTION OF RELATION. 209 

tionally, and lies outside of that vast world of conscious, 
responsible, guilty men with whom he is dealing. We assume 
then in our passage, the natural, unforced interpretation of 
the language ; what the apostle has not hesitated elsewhere 
to affirm or imply; what, in fact, he has been elaborately 
demonstrating, that all men are involved in the guilt of per- 
sonal transgression, which subjects them to the wrath of God, 
he has not hesitated to declare here, The mere introduction 
of the parallel between Adam and Christ, as the introducers 
respectively of the two opposite dispensations of life and death 
— a parallel which would force itself on the mind of one 
familiar with the narrative of the fall — does not imply in the 
apostle any new view regarding the personal guiltiness of the 
race. 

"But we may be asked, Does the apostle intend to affirm 
precisely the same relation between individual sin and death 
in the posterity of Adam as between the transgression and its 
penalty in the head of the race? In other words, does not 
the interpreting of our passage of individual sin really make 
every man virtually his own Adam, in that by his own sin he 
works out his own death? I answer, that we cannot, of 
course, doubt the peculiar and special significance of the sin 
of Adam and its causative relation to that of all succeeding 
generations. In Adam we all die, because in bringing death 
upon himself he brought death upon all his posterity; he 
incurred the dreadful penalty not only for himself but for 
the race. But this is not the whole of it. Not only did he 
incur for his posterity the certainty of death, but the certainty 
of sin. His act made their sinning as inevitable as their 
dying. And while the sinful acts of his descendants have no 
such sweeping effect and extraordinary significance as did his ; 



210 SIN AND DEATH IN ADAM AND THE BACE. 

while they are not like his, critical and determinative of the 
destiny of a race, but rather portions of an already determined 
line and process of development, they are in each individual 
case as naturally and necessarily connected with the individual 
doom of death as was the trespass of Adam with the general 
doom of the race. Universal man must die ; but also uni- 
versal man must sin ; therefore the apostle's added phrase, 
" in that all sinned," is necessary to complete his statement. 
Otherwise we should have in Adam, indeed, sin and death 
appearing together, but in his posterity only one of the two 
factors ; the presence of the effect without the presence of the 
cause, or rather, the presence of one of the two results of 
Adam's trespass without the equally necessary presence of the 
other. It would seem, in that case, that death might have 
made the entire circuit of the race without a co-extensive 
prevalence of sin. The added clause, " in that all sinned," 
fills out the picture. It shows us sin and death entering in 
fearful brotherhood through the opened door of the primal 
transgression, getting a foothold in humanity, and thence- 
forward doing in inseparable fellowship their ruthless work 
upon the race. Adam's sin determined indeed the doom 
of death for all mankind ; but it equally determined for all 
mankind the inheritance of depravity and the fact of trans- 
gression, and their inseparableness in the issue is but the 
result of their causal conjunction in the beginning. 



XIV. 
ACCUKSED FROM CHRIST. 

Eoraans 9 : 3. 

" For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my 
brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh.". 

THE Apostle Paul had touched the loftiest height of his 
glowing rhetoric in the eighth of Romans. Rapidly he 
had swept the keys of its sublime harmonies. By the way of 
the sonship and inheritance of the Christian, and the throes 
of a groaning and yet not hopeless creation, and the benefi- 
cent mission of " all things," he had reached the cloudless 
altitude of his ringing challenge, "Who shall separate?" 
and his triumphant assurance, "Nay, in all these things 
we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. 
For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor an- 
gels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor 
things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, 
shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in 
Christ Jesus our Lord." 

From this swelling tide of rapture the spirit of the 
apostle passes, at the close of chapter eight, to the re- 
lations which his own people have sustained to the 
wondrous drama of redemption. The glorious promise 
that illumined the dawn of their history, and the 

wretched realization that has darkened its present, rises 

211 



212 ACCURSED FROM CHRIST. 

before him in their deepest contrasts of glory and of shame. 
In reverting to these strikingly contrasted scenes of his 
country's fortunes, his language still breathes the impassioned 
fervor with which that sublime contemplation has inspired it. 
He descends from his height of Christian rapture on a flood- 
tide of patriotic sympathy. " I speak," he exclaims, " the 
truth in Christ ; I utter no falsehood ; my conscience bearing 
me witness in the Holy Ghost, that I have great sorrow and 
unceasing anguish in my heart." Such an utterance follow- 
ing closely on the heels of a strain of such sublime majesty is 
too weighty and emphatic to lead nowhere, as in our English 
Scriptures it assuredly does, except to a sentiment which has 
ever been repugnant to the Christian consciousness — which 
that consciousness has found it hard to reconcile alike with 
the apostle's absolute devotion to the service of bis Master, 
and his exulting conviction of inseparableness from the love 
of God in Christ Jesus his Lord. Did the Apostle Paul, we 
involuntarily ask ourselves, and especially did he just now, 
when his rapt spirit was revelling in the fullness of that 
Christian hope and confidence whose swelling tide had borne 
him up to this highest heaven of rapture, did he just now 
wish, or say that he could wish, that under any circumstances, 
or for any cause he might himself be accursed from Christ? 
By what law of mental action could even a quasi willingness 
to be for any conceivable reason accursed from that Saviour 
from whom his rapt spirit sees that neither life, nor death, 
nor angels, nor principalities, can dissever him, just now sug- 
gest itself to his mind ? Can one find in the annals of liter- 
ature an utterance more incongruous with its fellows, or more 
inopportune than this ? Can we conceive a place in which it 
would be less looked for or less welcome ? 



THE POINT OF THE QUESTION. 213 

And admitting that the apostle could in any form express 
a quasi willingness to forego for the benefit of his people the 
joys of his own eternal union with the Saviour, to relinquish 
all that he saw in the infinite merits of the death and exalta- 
tion of Jesus, could he express that willingness in such a 
form ? Could he have expressed it in a way which would 
imply that the sacrifice if submitted to would be of any 
avail ? That the curse which he was ready to invoke upon 
his own head for the sake of his people, would reach its end ? 
Would the infinite reluctance, the sense of utter and irrepara- 
ble loss to himself, which would accompany such an act of 
devotion, not dictate some other language than that of wish- 
ing himself accursed from Christ? Would not his language 
be rather that of reluctant acquiescence in the agonies of 
separation from the Lord whom he loves, if such a sacrifice 
could purchase the salvation of his people ? 

But now by what right do we question the fittingness of 
this alleged apostolic utterance ? The question remains not 
whether the apostle could in our view invoke with propriety 
such anathema from his Lord, but whether he did utter it. 
Who, we are asked, shall decide on the lengths to which the zeal 
of the emancipated soul may carry it ? May there not be depths 
in the apostle's devotion to his brethren, which our shallow 
benevolence is unable to fathom ? It is a question not of our 
duller reasoning over what the apostle might say, but of what 
he did say as he contemplated this relation of his brethren 
to the Christ whom they had anathematized, and to whom 
for their sakes he was willing himself to become anathema ? 
The passage divides itself into apparently two, but in reality 
into three portions. 

1. I speak the truth in Christ ; I utter not falsehood ; my 



214 ACCURSED FEOM CHRIST. 

conscience bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost, that I 
have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart ; 

2. For I could wish that I myself were accursed from 
Christ 

3. For the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to 
the flesh. 

I divide and render substantially according to the English 
version verses 2 and 3. 

The third I separate into two halves ; the first half sepa- 
rated from the words preceding and following by parenthesis 
thus (for I could wish that I myself were accursed from 
Christ), and then adjoining the last member of the verse, 
to the close of the second, and thus making it fill out the 
abruptly closing first and second verses which they bring to 
a smooth and fitting termination ; thus, " That I have great 
sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart, for the sake of 
my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh." Thus it 
is seen that the main sentence — severing the part which we can- 
not but feel is an offending member both in thought and in 
construction — glides along with entire smoothness, and that 
the abruptness which at least seems very harsh entirely dis- 
appears. The ' difficulty then lies with the words which we 
have enclosed in parenthesis, and it remains to examine care- 
fully this clause, and see whether we are shut up to the con- 
struction which our English versions, and which most of the 
versions give to it ; or whether we can give it a fresh con- 
struction entirely in accordance both with what precedes and 
follows, and make it instead of an offense and a stumbling- 
block, a natural and ennobling appendage to the sentence. 

First, then, in analyzing the phrase, we find the verb 
eu/o/iat, which our English version renders wish, will, as if 



THE VERB MISTRANSLATED. 215 

the Greek were i&i?-a> or ftou?.o/j.at. Euyo/xat means pray to 
God, pray (in the classics sometimes, to glory). This mean- 
ing in some of its aspects I think euyu/iai. never renounces, 
and fiuuAo/iai and Iftiloj never admit. Eu/o/j.ac is here by 
the commentators softened down to wish, will (as if it were 
fiuu?.u/xat, l&ikaj), simply for the sake of this passage in 
Romans, and without authority from any special usage. See 
e. g., Acts 26 : 29, euzai/iyv av rw Oewjwould to God {would pray 
to God). Acts 27 : 29, eoyo^-o ijfiipav y^iafrai, they prayed 
that it might become day. 

2. But secondly, not only is the verb mistranslated, but 
there is also a misrendering of the tense. This is the Tmperf. 
Ind. yuzofiyv, which is properly not I could pray (or wish), but 
I was praying, used to pray, a continued or Imperfect past. 
True, indeed, these Imperfect tenses ■qv^oLtr t v i ipouXotajv, ij&eXov 
are not unfrequently used with ellipsis of " a> " as rfyoflajv 
(a>) I could or might be praying, kftuu).6;ir t v («v) I could wish 
or be wishing. But this is only the exceptional use of these 
tenses. It is not to -be taken for granted, as their primary 
and proper meaning, and is not to be assigned to them with- 
out a sufficient reason. ■ Sometimes indeed the two meanings 
nearly run into each other, and it may be doubtful which 
is the proper rendering of the imperfect. Thus Acts 25, 
Agrippa says, ifiooAofirjv av.ovaai abrdq, I was wishing, or I 
could wish to hear him myself. But ordinarily the distinction 
is to be preserved and the confusion is not to be lightly and 
carelessly assumed. Thus in Acts 27 : 29, They then cast out the 
anchors y.ai euyovro rjftipav yevia^ai and prayed that it might 
become day, that day might dawn. So Xen. Anabasis, Lib. 
I., 3, ol [xh eugovTo dha^rjvai, some were praying, or went to pray- 
ing, that they might be caught as being treacherous. Ana- 



216 ACCCTESED FROM CHRIST. 

basis, Lib. L, "And they used to report his prayer (ztyyv), how 
that he prayed ox; eu^sro, how he prayed, used to pray that he 
might live," etc. Thus until we find some sufficient reason we 
are to adhere to the natural and proper form of the imperfect, 
and if one departs from this on him rests the burden of proof. 
Until then we have some good reason for a different rendering, 
Paul's assertion is here to be taken historically, and he is to 
be regarded not as saying what he might or would do, but 
what he did formerly use to do, " I was praying or used to 
pray." 

3. And this rendering becomes all the more easy, not to 
say imperative, by giving the true force to auros iyd), I myself, 
which has been made to do duty with eloac and made to serve 
as adjunct to the infinitive instead of being constructed, as by 
the invariable laws of the Greek language it must be so long 
as auTos iyco stand together, as the emphatic subject of the 
principal verb rju^d/j.rjv. Thus it is not " I prayed (much less I 
could pray) that I myself might be anathema " ; but " I my- 
self was praying or used to pray to be anathema." If the 
emphasis were to be laid on slvat, the pronoun iyu) must either 
be omitted, when 7]b^6/iy]v £//e abrov (jtiiabrov) ehat could and 
naturally would be attracted into ib/o/iyv abrd<; elvac avdfte/xa, 
I prayed that I might myself be avdftsna. But as it stands, 
the attraction is impossible and the £yd> abroq is the emphatic 
subject of iuxo/iyv, and all the more emphatic the farther it is 
separated from the verb. It is not "I prayed (or could 
pray) to be myself anathema from Christ," but " I myself once 
prayed to be anathema, from Christ." The emphasis lies 
on the action of the principal verb. The apostle adds inci- 
dentally this special ground of his sympathy with his Jewish 
brethren — he puts his own case into common unity with them. 



THE POSITION OF THE APOSTLE. 217 

On the principle of " non ignora mali," etc., that he as well as 
they was involved in that awfnl crime, he enforces the so- 
lemnity and earnestness of his affirmation of sympathetic an- 
guish over the condition of his countrymen. 

4. And with this corrected rendering of the tense of the 
verb and of the emphasis resting on the abzbq iy6, throwing 
the action of the verb into the past, and making the apostle 
glance briefly but forcibly at his own experience, and give a 
chapter out of his own history, we see why he uses the 
past historical tense ; we see why he throws the emphasis on 
his own history ; we see too, that he uses the verb eu X o/iai in 
the full strength of its import to pray to God, to imprecate, 
rather than any such weaker verb as fiouAo/iai or £&£Aa> ; and 
we see why we do utter injustice to the meaning of ev^o/iai 
when we i educe it to a meaning which was in no way 
in the mind of the apostle. We see also why the apostle uses 
terms so harsh and apparently so unapostolic as dvdfte/xa 
ehat axb Jptffrod, terms which he could in no possible way 
have uttered from his apostolic standpoint. He could say in 
all truth that he himself once prayed to be accursed from 
Christ. He had himself invoked upon his head anathema 
from Jesus. Whether he was present in person and joined in 
the infuriated madness of the Jews, when they cried " Away 
with him," and prayed that his blood might be upon them- 
selves and their children, we know not ; but we know that if 
he did not join in, he succeeded to their crime, and invoked 
upon himself all its guilt and woe ; with soul full of madness 
against the Lord and his disciples, he entered houses and 
haled the votaries of the faith to prison, joined actively in 
the martyrdom of Stephen, and " threatening vengeance and 
slaughter," pursued the disciples to foreign cities. The lan- 

T 



218 ACCUESEB FKOM CHRIST. 

guage in which lie here describes his conduct is precisely the 
language which marked the blasphemer and the persecutor. It 
is utterly impossible that he could now describe his emotions 
of apostolical compassion in the language of blasphemy and 
hate. He did then imprecate on himself anathema from the 
Lord Jesus ; he could in no possible way describe in such 
terms the compassionate emotions with which his bosom was 
now swelling toward his unbelieving countrymen, toward 
those who still were drinking that bitter cup which he had 
once joined them in praying might be commended to his and 
their lips. 

Is it urged in plea for this view that we can understand 
Paul's expressions only by entering sympathetically into his 
inmost experience, his fervent patriotism, his burning zeal 
for the salvation of men ? True, but may we not quite as likely 
fail to fathom his conception of the unutterable woe of the 
soul that has accursed itself from Christ ? Nothing can jus- 
tify our ascribing such a sentiment to the apostle but the most 
irrefragable evidence. Michaelis' charge against the prayer 
as fanatical seems amply justified, and we may well question 
if the whole New Testament besides furnishes so striking a 
perversion of apostolic and Christian feeling at the expense 
of so gross a breach of exegetical evidence. The one radical 
misconception shatters the whole structure of the sentence, 
and brings in its train several unquestionable and serious 
errors. It turns eu^o/iac, pray, into the widely different and 
much weaker {3ouXo/j.cu. It then weakens yj3ouX6fi7)v f was wishing, 
into 7)(3ouX6/i7)v av, I could be wishing or could wish. It 
turns T)d^6fiTjv abroz I myself used to pray that I might, 
into I could wish that I myself might be. It converts the 
apostle's reluctant acknowledgment of his former participa- 



AN UNHAPPY CHANGE. 219 

tion in the madness of his countrymen into " {pooX6p.rp (or 
y&eXov)" I was wishing or used to wish. It turns yvxtfiyv 
auras tyd), I myself used (once) to pray, into I could wish that I 
myself were, etc., and changes as I have indicated the apostle's 
reluctant acknowledgment of his former participation in the 
madness of his countrymen into a quasi wish, couched in the 
language of Jewish hate and fanaticism, that for the sake 
of his unbelieving countrymen he might himself undergo 
the horrors of exile from his Lord. 



XV. 
BAPTISM FOR THE DEAD. 

1 Corinthians 15 : 29-32. 

I PROPOSE subjecting to a careful re-examination this 
much vexed, but always interesting passage — a passage 
which has been the occasion perhaps of more perplexity to 
commentators, of more varying opinions, and of more abun- 
dant discussion, than any other of equal brevity in the eutire 
Scriptures. I have no far-fetched and startling theory to 
propose ; no subtle and ingenious interpretation to defend. I 
believe that the true solution lies near — is to be evolved from 
the very scope and drift of the apostle's thought, and yet does 
not lie in the quarter in which biblical scholars are now gen- 
erally disposed to find it. 

I commence by translating anew both the preceding and 
following context of the passage, that the reader may have at 
once under his eye all the elements for forming his judgment. 
I enter into no criticism of the text, and shall be careful in 
all cases where strict accuracy might admit, not to depart 
from the received English version. In one passage alone do I 
adopt a materially new construction of the original, and this 
in a passage which has no direct connection with the imme- 
diate theme of my discussion, and for reasons which are 
purely philological and rhetorical — not on the ground of 
any substantial variation in the thought. I translate as 
follows : 
220 



THE PASSAGE TRANSLATED. 221 

" (16) For if the dead (strictly, if dead persons) do not rise, 
neither is Christ risen ; (17) and if Christ is not risen, your 
faith is vain ; ye are yet in your sins ; (18) then also they 
that have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. (19) If in 
this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most 
miserable. 

" (20) But now (in fact) Christ is risen from the dead, the 
firstfruits of them that sleep. (21) For since through man 
is death, also through man is the resurrection of the dead ; 
(22) for as in Adam all die, so also in Christ will all be made 
alive. (23) But each in his own class [order] ■; as the firstfruits, 
Christ ; (24) then they who are Christ's at his coming'; then, 
at the last, when he delivereth up the kingdom to God, even 
the Father ; when he shall have destroyed all dominion, and 
all authority and power — (25) for he must reign until he 
shall have subjected all enemies under his feet; (26) as a 
final enemy, Death is destroyed. (27) For 'He subjected all 
things under his feet.' But when he [God] shall have said 
that all things have been subjected to him, it is manifest that 
[it will be] with the exception of Him who subjected to him 
all things: (28) and when all things have been subjected to 
him, then also the Son himself will be subject to Him who 
subjected to him all things, that God may be all in all. 

" (29) For, what will they do who undergo baptism for the 
dead, if the dead do not rise at all ? Why are they baptized 
for the dead ? (30) Why do also we stand in jeopardy every 
hour ? (31) (Daily do I die, I protest it by the glorying in you 
which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord.) (32) If [merely] 
after the manner of men I fought with wild beasts at Ephesus, 
what advantageth it me? If the dead rise not, let us eat 
and drink, for to-morrow we die." 



222 BAPTISM FOE THE BEAD. 

The reader who has the Greek text before him, will be at 
no loss for the reason of most of the departures in the foregoing 
from the ordinary English version. I translate, for the sake 
of uniformity, y.arapy^arj destroy, in ver. 24 as well as in ver. 
26. I render vizordaaeiv uniformly put in subjection, or sub- 
ject, as is done in ver. 28 in the common version, and as in 
Hebrews 2 : 8, where the passage is cited from the Psalms, 
and for a like purpose. The first part of ver. 27 I enclose in 
quotation marks, regarding it as a mere citation from the 
eighth Psalm to justify, in a more formal way, the parentheti- 
cal statement of ver. 25. In ver. 27 I follow Meyer and 
Alford in making God the subject of sinr), and rendering the 
verb by the perfect future, which is the natural grammatical 
construction, and seems unobjectionable in respect to sense, — 
the " saying " being thus referred to the time when the sub- 
jection of all things shall have been consummated. My con- 
struction of verses 24, 25, 26, 1 leave, with one or two remarks, 
to the judgment of the reader. I need not defend to the 
classical scholar the possibility of rendering rd riXog, adverb- 
ially, at the last, finally. The use of orav with the subjunc- 
tive, is more easily explained by making it introduce the 
protasis of a hypothetical proposition, than by making it 
describe the accompaniments of to riXog taken as a noun. 
In this latter case, the future indicative would seem much more 
natural, at least in the first of the two clauses. The rhetorical 
advantages of my construction I believe still more decisive. 
While expressing no essentially different thought — for it still 
leaves room for that triple division of the resurrection process 
which many are disposed to find in it (though I believe 
erroneously) : first, the resurrection of Christ ; then that 
of his people at his coding; and, finally, the general 



A SPECIAL ADVANTAGE. 223 

resurrection accompanying the last and crowning act in 
the great drama of redemption — it gains much, I think, 
in the force and beauty of its exhibition. Two or three 
somewhat loosely connected and disjointed sentences are 
molded into one of those full and rounded periods which 
occasionally surprise and delight us amid the impetuous flow 
of Paul's careless and rapid, but energetic, and sometimes 
even elegant diction, culminating in precisely the statement 
which is especially appropriate to the apostle's general theme, 
viz., the doing away and annihilating of death at and by the 
resurrection. In the common construction of these verses, 
this statement slips in as a subordinate and half-incidental 
one. With this it becomes the climactic and crowning mem- 
ber of a sentence full of weighty and majestic thought— the 
great and glorious fact which consummates and completes 
the subjection of the enemies of the Great Deliverer, and 
fitly accompanies his surrender of the universal sceptre to 
the Supreme Deity from whom it was received. 

A special advantage in this construction is the clearing up 
of the seemingly tautological and awkward repetition in ver. 
25 and 27. In the former, " For he must reign," etc., is a 
parenthetical and incidental assertion, introduced as the 
support of the hypothetical statement of his putting down all 
rule and authority and power, and in ver. 27, having com- 
pleted his main idea, he now returns to establish the incidental 
statement by a formal quotation. The yap, for, is here like 
the yap at the close of the Lord's Prayer (Matt. 6 : 14), 
where the Saviour, having introduced the petition, " forgive 
us our debts as we forgive our debtors," returns, at the close 
of the prayer, to the clause regarding the forgiving of ene- 
mies, for the purpose of illustrating and enforcing it. I think 



224 BAPTISM FOR THE DEAD. 

this much better than to refer the clause, as is commonly done, 
to the passage immediately preceding, regarding death. Its 
more natural reference is to the other. I merely add that 
here, as in Hebrews 2 : 8, it is used in a sense entirely foreign 
to that which seems to lie on the surface of the original, or 
was probably present to the consciousness of the writer ; and 
it must be regarded as developing under a special inspiration, 
the hidden and deeper meaning of the Spirit. On the re- 
mainder of this glorious passage — on the glimpse which it 
opens to us of the stupendous revolutions yet to occur in the 
outward forms of Divine Sovereignty, when the Theanthropos, 
the God-Man, while retaining, in his essential oneness with 
the Father, his share in the sway of the universe, and while 
remaining, as the son of David, king forever over his spirit- 
ual Israel, shall, as Messiah, abdicate the throne of universal 
empire, and — the purpose of its temporary transfer being 
accomplished, and the kingdom whose foundations had been 
laid in lowliness and tears, being consummated in triumph 
and glory — the sceptre shall revert from the Incarnate God 
to the pure and absolute Deity by whom it had been tempo- 
rarily relinquished — on all this I cannot now comment, but 
turn to the more immediate subject of this article. 

Of the thousand and one explanations of the phrase " bap- 
tized for the dead," it would be idle and beyond my limits 
to give a detailed enumeration. They turn upon differences 
partly in translation, partly in exegesis, partly in both. 
Some take baptism figuratively, as a baptism of afflictions 
and martyrdom, others literally as water baptism. Some 
take bngp in the local sense of " over, above" some as equiva- 
lent to avrt, instead of, others, " on behalf of for the good of" 
Some explain vsxpwv of the bodies of Christians, conceived as 



AN ANCIENT DISAGREEMENT. 225 

dead ; others of Christ, taking the plural for the singular ; 
others give it its natural sense — the dead. Hence flows a 
great variety of interpretations of which I can but glance 
cursorily at a few. The disagreement began in antiquity. 
Origen, Chrysostom, Theodoret, Epiphanius, Tertullian, Am- 
brose, all have their separate modes of unravelling the diffi- 
culty. Chrysostom understands the term " dead " of the 
bodies of the baptized, and refers the passage to baptism as 
a symbol of the resurrection. " Baptized for the dead " is 
his language, — " i. e., for their dead bodies ; for unto this 
thou art baptized, believing in the resurrection of the dead." 
Baptism is on behalf of our bodies, as a symbol of their 
resurrection. Somewhat differently, but still referring it to 
the body, Theodoret : " He who is baptized," says the apostle, 
" is buried with his Lord, in order that sharing in his death, 
he may also become a sharer in his resurrection. But if the 
body is dead and does not rise, why, I pray, is it baptized? " 
Epiphanius explains it of clinics, catechumens, who claim 
and receive baptism (jzpo T7Jg reXsuTTJs Xourpoo xara^touvraq) 
just before death, and this view is substantially endorsed by 
Calvin, who refers it to such as receive baptism just over the 
dead, on the verge of the grave {jam jam morituri). Pelagius, 
followed by some expositors, refers the vexpwv to Christ, taking 
the plural for the singular, a usage abundantly familiar to 
the Greek poets, but not to be lightly assumed in prose, and 
especially in the New Testament. Expressions so general as 
Matt. 2 : 20, " They are dead who sought the young child's 
Jife," are but imperfectly parallel. Of those who thus make 
the baptism to be "on behalf of, for the sake of Christ," 
some understand it literally of water baptism, others figura- 
tively, of a baptism of blood. Rosenmiiller (following Nos- 



226 BAPTISM FOR THE DEAD. 

selt and Ziegler) interprets : " Qui maximis vitce periculis se 
exponunt ut moriantur " — who expose themselves to the great- 
est perils of life that they may die. Luther explains thus : 
" To give confirmation to the resurrection, Christians caused 
themselves to be baptized over the dead, i. e., over their sepul- 
chres ; " — a fanciful conceit, unwarranted by any facts from 
this early period, and by the New Testament use of Onip 
which nowhere bears the local sense of over. Olshausen 
translates literally, " Baptized on behalf of, for the benefit of, 
the dead," but makes the benefit to consist in each successive 
baptism contributing to complete the ir^pwiia, the full num- 
ber of believers that must be made up before the tenants of 
the sepulchre can realize the long-wished-for Parousia and 
resurrection ; an interpretation, however, so improbable that 
Olshausen himself hardly propounds it when he abandons it 
for another scarcely more probable, viz. : baptized instead of 
the dead, to fill up the ranks vacated by the dead — to re- 
place those whom death has snatched away. But under this 
construction, " for the dead " is a gratuitous addition. 
Nobody is baptized especially for this purpose, and all bap- 
tisms accomplish it equally. The question, therefore, " Why 
are they baptized for the dead ? " resolves itself into, " Why 
are they baptized ? " Bengel interprets : " Those who receive 
baptism and the Christian faith when they have death placed 
before their eyes (as it were hanging over the dead), and 
from old age, disease, or martyrdom are about to join them- 
selves to the dead. Some, rejecting all the above, simply 
take the passage eliptically, " baptized for the dead," i. e., 
for the resurrection of the dead. 

This slight resume of opinions will indicate the perplexity 
which the passage has occasioned to commentators. I cannot 



ANOTHER OPINION. 227 

examine them separately, and most of them sufficiently 
refute themselves, being obviously the offspring of desperate, 
though ingenious conjecture. One needs but to read them to 
feel that their authors grope blindly and therefore vainly ; 
that they have failed to utter the "open sesame" which 
unlocks the secret of the passage. Some translate falsely, 
some interpret falsely ; some both. 

I have purposely left unmentioned one opinion, to which, 
from its wide and growing prevalence, I wish to devote a 
more particular consideration. It is that which takes the 
baptism to be literally a baptism on behalf of the dead, a 
baptism of living men for the benefit of persons who had 
died unbaptized. It assumes that a practice which we know 
had some slight later prevalence in ecclesiastical antiquity, 
existed already in the Corinthian church, and is elevated by 
Paul into an argumentum ex concessis in favor of the resur- 
rection. It was first held among the ancients, we believe, by 
Ambrose ; was accepted by Anselm, Erasmus, Grotius, etc., 
and has been adopted by very many of the best recent com- 
mentators, as Billroth, Riickert, Augusti, Neander, Meyer, 
De Wette. Alford in England, and in this country, Dr. 
Hodge, of Princeton, have given it their sanction. Most of 
them overcome any objections which may be urged, or any 
difficulties which they may themselves feel, drawn from 
extrinsic considerations, by a confident appeal to the obvious 
and grammatical sense of the passage. Some find in it no 
difficulty whatever. Riickert, who proclaims it almost as a 
principle of interpretation that the expositor should have 
neither faith nor feeling, — and who has nearly succeeded in 
making his own works exemplify his principle, — will not 
allow a moment's wavering. " The words are so clear that 



228 BAPTISM FOR THE DEAD. 

they coutain no ambiguity whatever, and their literal sense 
accords so perfectly with the general train of thought, that 
nothing less objectionable could have been inserted." He deems 
it a good argumentum ad hominem, whether Paul disapproved it 
or not : although in fact Riickert thinks that Paul did not 
disapprove it. An "ideal Paul, with the cultivation of the 
nineteenth century," might have seen with M. Riickert that 
'■ the usage was not only superstitious, but pernicious." But 
whether " the actual and historical Paul " had reached this 
correctness and clearness of spiritual perception is with 
him exceedingly problematical. De Wette, Meyer, Alford 
accept the interpretation unhesitatingly, regarding the pas- 
sage as a sufficient voucher for the fact, while they do not 
believe in Paul's approval of the custom. Neander accedes 
to the explanation more reluctantly. He argues stoutly 
against it, and almost to the very close of his remarks gives 
the reader the impression that he will reject it. He says : 
" Thus it should seem that persons caused themselves to be 
baptized for the benefit of the dead. But this seems in 
apostolic times exceedingly unnatural, and in contradiction 
with all that which assumes personal faith as indispensable. 
Hence at first even infant baptism was not practised. True, 
we find early an enlargement of the sphere of baptism ; e. g., 
the Shepherd of Hernias states that the apostles, after their 
death, baptized the pious of the Old Covenant. But here it 
was always assumed that they, after death, had been led to 
faith in Christ, of which baptism was merely a necessary 
condition and means. But if baptism was to take the place 
of faith, no proclamation of the gospel would be needed. 
Paul could not adduce such an opinion without condemning 
it ; but if we even grant that he could have withheld this 



neander's interpretation. 229 

utterance as not lying within the scope of his present object, 
yet how are we to explain the rise of such a superstition 
among the early Christians ? " 

" It is claimed that we have traces of such a vicarious 
baptism. Epiphanius speaks of such a usage among the dis- 
ciples of Cerinthus. But, granting, that in his time the prac- 
tice existed among these people, Cerinthus himself was very 
far from practising it. Besides, Epiphanius is no reliable 
witness. Chrysostom, in a homily on the passage, ascribes a 
similar doctrine to the Marcionites. But the Marcionites of 
that age were an ignorant, superstitious, country people, 
degenerated from the free spirit of their founder. Nothing 
of the sort can certainly be ascribed to Marcion himself. 
Tertullian alleges no such charge against Marcion (Ad v. 
Marcion., V. X.) since his book De resur. camis., in treating 
of our passage will not assume that Paul deals in the argu- 
mentatio ad hominem, and knows nothing of any such 
usage." 

When after this we find Neander himself yielding to this 
interpretation, we may well suppose that he found very 
serious difficulties attending every other. And he, in fact, 
adopts it only in a qualified manner. He supposes that 
specific cases, with which the apostle was acquainted, may 
have occurred at Corinth, especially as a recent pestilence 
had prevailed, which had perhaps carried off many who, 
being brought to the faith, died before they could receive 
baptism ; in some cases, therefore, a kinsman or near friend 
might have volunteered to do for the dead what he would 
gladly have done for himself, and the motive, at least, could 
not be condemned by the apostle. "Perhaps," he adds, 
" Paul reserved his condemnation of the practice until his 

U 



230 BAPTISM FOR THE DEAD. 

coming, and it was his disapproval of it then, which caused 
it to disappear from the church." To the latter effect also 
Meyer. 

I believe I must be pardoned if I attach more weight to 
Neander's arguments than to his counter conclusion. I 
admit that his authority, combined with that of so large a 
number of eminent and able interpreters, and sustained as is 
their judgment by the apparent, superficial, merely verbal 
import of the passage, is not without weight. But we 
cannot accept even all this as ultimate, and must try to 
satisfy our own minds whether they have reached the real 
sense of the apostle. With Ruckert, we say, " give to the 
sacred writer nothing that is your own ; " but with him we add, 
" take from him nothing that is his," and we shall try to pur- 
sue our examination in the spirit of both these principles. 

That a practice so grossly superstitious as that of baptizing 
living persons for the benefit of dead ones, whether having 
died with or without faith — that notions so widely exagger- 
ated of the necessity and efficacy of baptism, had already 
sprung up in the primitive church, and under the eye of the 
apostle, and are alluded to by him not only without express 
censure, but with the ^wasi-sanction of being incorporated as 
an element into an argument for the resurrection, is intrinsi- 
cally improbable, and can be admitted only on the most de- 
cisive testimony. What is that testimony ? First, not one 
syllable about it in all the New Testament besides. No inti- 
mation either in the Acts or the Epistles of any such practice, 
or of any tendency toward it. Tertullian, writing late in the 
second century, knows nothing of the existence of any such 
usage even among the heretical Marcionites, against whom he 
wrote, and as he mentions such a possible interpretation of 



A SUPERSTITIOUS CUSTOM. 231 

this passage, but only to reject and condemn it, 1 we may- 
assume that if it ,had prevailed among the Marcionites of his 
time, he would have certainly mentioned it. Chrysostom and 
Epiphanius, who wrote fully three hundred years after our 
epistle was written, are our earliest vouchers for tbe existence 
of such a usage. With them it is confined to the heretical 
sects of the Marcionites and Cerinthians. Chrysostom tells 
us of the Marcionites, that if a catechumen died unbaptized, 
they concealed a person under the bed ; the dead man was 
then asked whether he wished to be baptized, and upon an 
affirmative reply being given by the concealed person, the 
latter was baptized in place of the deceased. Epiphanius, 
likewise, tells us of " a tradition regarding the Cerinthians, 
that when any person died among tbem before receiving bap- 
tism, others were baptized in their name, that they might 

i"Noli apostolum novum statiin auctorem aut confirmatoreni ejus (insti- 
tutionis) denotare, ut tanto rnagis sisteret carnis resurreetionera quanto illi qui 
vane pro niortuis baptizarentur, fide resurrectiouis hoc facerent. Habenius 
ilium alicubi unius baptismi definitorem. Igitur et pro niortuis tingui pro 
corporibus est tingui : mortuum enim corpus osteudimus." (Cont. Marcion. V., 
10.) 

I add the comment of Jacobi from Kitto's Cycl. of Bib. Literature. " Tertullian 
in these words distinguishes a false application of baptism by substitution, from 
the general one adhered to by the apostles ; he thinks that the apostle confirms 
baptism pro mortuis, not in that erroneous, but in a proper sense, compatible with 
his other and general views of baptism. Of that erroneous practice, however, 
Turtullian, in this, as in the other place, evidently knows no more than what is 
indicated by Paul in the above passage, neither does he mention that such a cus- 
tom prevailed in his time among the Marcionites or any others." Jacobi, though 
he accords with Neander in interpreting our passage, yet says, as the conclusion 
of his investigation, "All that we can infer from the above statement is, that 
baptism by substitution took place among the Marcionites, and perhaps also among 
the Cerinthians and other smaller sects, toward the close of the fourth century, 
a period when the confused views of the church as to the relation of the external 
to the spiritual, might easily have favored that erroneous custom ; but that it 
existed between that period and the time when Paul wrote, is wholly unsub- 
stantiated." 



.232 BAPTISM FOR THE DEAD. 

undergo no punishment in the resurrection, from their failure 
to receive baptism." Epiphanius, Neander tells us, is no 
reliable authority, yet admitting that the practice prevailed 
among them in his time, it is certain, he tells us, that neither 
Cerinthus nor Marcion could have introduced it. The sum 
of the historical testimony then is, that nearly three hundred 
years after the apostles, in an age when the most exaggerated 
notions regarding the efficacy of baptism prevailed, the usage 
in question existed among one or two small, heretical, and 
ignorant sects ; yet not even then in the church generally, 
and not even among these at an early period. How great, 
then, the improbability that it should have already sprung 
up among the Corinthians, and gained a footing sufficient to 
secure its canonization in an apostolical epistle ! 

And improbable precisely among the Corinthians. There 
was indeed enough that was reprehensible in the Corinthian 
church ; but it does not seem the soil favorable to the spring- 
ing up of an abuse like this. Its disorders were the result 
rather of lax morality, lax discipline, spiritual pride, and in- 
tellectual pride, than of a superstitious and slavish ritualism. 
The Corinthians discarded Paul for the more eloquent and phi- 
losophical Apollos ; they suffered a man to live incestuously with 
his father's wife ; they displayed their superiority to an over- 
scrupulous conscientiousness by sitting in idols' temples, and 
partaking of idols' sacrifices ; they desecrated the Lord's Supper 
by turning it into a common meal ; they used their spiritual 
gifts for the purposes of ostentatious display, and finally, 
they speculated, with philosophical license, on the impossi- 
bility and absurdity of the resurrection. All their tendencies 
were rather in the direction of an idealistic exaltation over, 
and contempt of, ceremonies, than of a superstitious enslave- 



AN INCONCEIVABLE PRACTICE. 233 

ment to them ; and though we can by no means deny that 
amid the multifarious abuses, speculative and practical, which 
had developed themselves at Corinth, there should have 
appeared such a strange and exceptional one as this, yet 
surely it is not in harmony with the general character either 
of the excellencies or the defects of the Corinthian church. 
At all events, the persons who denied the resurrection for 
idealistic reasons, as is evident below, are not the ones who 
would have been likely to be the victims of this gross and 
materializing superstition. Even the apostle virtually separ- 
ates those whom he is addressing from this class — "They 
who are baptized," — and yet it is only as an argumentum ad 
hominem that this appeal has any value, and only with those 
who practised the rite that it could have any weight. We 
must assume, therefore, that it both existed in the Corinthian 
church and precisely with those who denied the resurrection, 
else the argument becomes not only intrinsically, but rela- 
tively, unmeaning. 

But, again, is it conceivable that such a practice should have 
existed at Corinth without Paul's disapproving it, and that 
disapproving, he should not have expressed his disapproval? 
nay, rather, that by incorporating it into a weighty argument, 
he should have seemingly given it his sanction ? In a letter 
mainly devoted to the correction of abuses, which descends to 
topics such as the fact and the manner of women's speaking 
in the assemblies of the church, would Paul leave such a fla- 
grant superstition as this wholly passed over except with the 
incidental and, by inference, commendatory notice here given 
to it, as belonging among the minor things to be set in order 
when he came? If it was sufficiently prevalent to make the 
brief mention here made of it intelligible, then it must have 



234 BAPTISM FOB THE DEAD. 

been so prevalent that Paul's omission to notice it could not 
have been from forgetful ness, and when he did have occasion 
to call it up, could he have done so without putting a stigma 
upon it ? for that his language does not, as Alford supposes, 
involve a censure, we shall see by-and-by. 

We are told, indeed, — and I grant the justness of the state- 
ment, — that Paul was in the habit of attending to but one 
thing at a time ; that, with his mind on a single point, he 
postponed for the time being other, perhaps intrinsically 
more important aspects of the case. Paul did not, when dis- 
cussing one topic, manifest the anxiety of a modern systematic 
theologian to guard his language against all possible cavil and 
misapplication ; but poured forth his thoughts with unfettered 
freedom and fullness of expression. Yet all this does not meet 
the present case, nor account for Paul's silence on so grave a 
matter. Two so-called analogous cases are cited from this 
epistle. Paul speaks, 11 : 5, of a woman speaking in public, 
Without disapproving of anything but the manner; while 
subsequently, 14 : 34, he condemns the thing itself. So again, 
at 8 : 10, he condemns sitting at meat in an idol's temple, as if 
he regarded it as objectionable merely because it gave offense 
to the weaker brethren, and not because it was intrinsically 
wrong ; but in 10 : 14-22, he denounces the thing itself as 
idolatry. Yet surely these furnish but slender analogies to 
the case in question. They prove that Paul may refer to a 
practice which he disapproves, without stating at the time 
every ground on which he disapproves it. As a matter of 
fact, both these usages — women's speaking in the public assem- 
blies, and the sitting at meat in idols' temples — he has men- 
tioned twice in the epistle, and each time for a distinct purpose 
of censure. Can we find in this any reason for supposing that 



ANOTHER OBJECTION. 235 

another really greater abuse than either of them, he would 
reserve entirely to a merely incidental and virtually com- 
mendatory mention at the very close of his epistle ? The case 
must be hard pressed that can seek for shelter under such 
precedents. Because in two cases, Paul, when first referring 
to them in terms of censure, has deferred the main ground of 
his condemnation to a subsequent more emphatic avowal, 
therefore we are authorized to suppose that he mio-ht refer to 
another greater evil than either, without any expression of his 
disapproval at all ! 

Another ground of objection is that the argument itself is 
a nullity. Even as an argumentum ad hominem, it "has no 
proper force. Unless, as already observed, the deniers of the 
resurrection and the practicers of the rite are the same per- 
sons, it has none whatever, for the only virtue of an ad homi- 
nem argument is derived from the admissions of your antago- 
nist. If he replies to you, I hold no such opinions, and 
believe in no such practices as those from which you argue, 
your argument of course falls to the ground. If those who 
denied the resurrection did not themselves believe and prac- 
tise this baptism for the dead, they would have replied to the 
apostle : Your argument amounts to nothing with us, for 
the practice is superstitious and senseless anyway. If you 
w r ill employ such reasoning, go and urge it with those with 
whom it will have force. But alike the nature of the two 
heresies, and the expression of the apostle — " They who are 
baptized " — render it improbable that both existed with the 
same class of persons. 

And in other respects also, the appeal is a nullity. Its 
force, if it has any, should rest on the fact that baptism on 
behalf of the dead involves a belief in the resurrection of the 



236 BAPTISM FOR THE DEAD. 

dead, and draws its significance from that belief. But all 
baptism proceeds on precisely the same belief, and this kind 
of baptism rests on no special difference of principle as to 
the resurrection, but upon a mere peculiarity of opinion as 
to the efficacy of baptism. There is, then, really no more 
pertinence in the inquiry, " Why are they baptized for the 
dead, if the dead rise not ? " than in asking, " Why are they 
baptized at all, if the dead rise not ? " The import of this 
species of baptism is no more nullified by the denial of the 
resurrection than that of ordinary believers' baptism, and 
the apostle has needlessly dragged in a superstitious observ- 
ance to point an argument which is just exactly as forcible, 
and far more dignified, without it. 

But again : the form of the question, " What will they do 
who are baptized," etc., is unsuited to this meaning. Meyer's 
interpretation of the ri mMjaouat, viz., (what sort of a thing), 
how foolish and absurd a thing will they do, is forced and 
inadmissible. That should rather require xi or nolov 7zoioogiv, 
(what sort of thing do they do ?) or some such form. 
Kiickert's " will they not cease to do it ? " is worthy of 
the rest of Riickert's interpretation of this passage. The 
true meaning of the phrase is — as substantially De Wette 
and Alford — what will they gain ? what will they do ? 
how will they get on? what will become of them? 
The question marks not merely the folly of the act, 
but its folly and uselessness for those who perform it. The 
question thus, under the interpretation we are considering, 
becomes entirely inappropriate. It should be, in effect, 
" How useless a thing do they do who are baptized for the 
dead ! What will those dead persons do or gain, for whom 
living men are baptized ? " As it is, the question indicates 



A FINAL OBJECTION. 237 

not that the dead are expected to be benefited, but the living 
persons who are baptized for them, and the folly of their 
action lies not in its failure to benefit the dead, but to benefit 
themselves. The second form of the apostle's question would, 
indeed, admit of either application. But this as more 
general, is to be explained by the more specific form of the 
first; and we here call attention, both as discrediting this 
interpretation, and pointing to the true one, to the fact that 
the apostle's question clearly indicates the absurdity of the 
action, not in its bearings on the dead, but on the living per- 
sons who undergo the baptism. 

My final objection to the exposition in question, I believe 
even more decisive. It does not suit the context. It is not 
in harmony with the apostle's train of thought. It foists an 
irrelevant, impertinent, disturbing idea 'into a line of senti- 
ment otherwise natural, coherent, and impressive. In order 
to show this, I must ask the reader to turn back to the pas- 
sage, and follow me in subjecting it to a careful analysis. 
He will see that the apostle treats the subject under two 
aspects, a negative and a positive, and that this makes really 
two divisions of that entire passage (from ver. 13 to ver. 34) 
in which he treats of the fact of the resurrection. The nega- 
tive part states with apostolic authoritativeness the disastrous 
consequences which flow from a denial of the resurrection. 
The positive part with equal authoritativeness affirms the 
resurrection, basing it on the resurrection of Christ, and fol- 
lowing it out to its glorious consequences in the annihilation 
of death, and the consummation of the kingdom of God. 
The second or positive portion, is interposed as a sort of di- 
gression between the sundered sections of the negative, and 
extends from ver. 20, " But now is Christ risen," to ver. 28, 



238 BAPTISM FOR THE DEAD. 

" that God may be all in all." The first or negative portion 
begins with ver. 13, and runs on to ver. 20, where it is broken 
by the introduction of the other positive, triumphant strain 
of sentiment which the impatient ardor of the apostle would 
allow him no longer to defer. At ver. 29, when the fiery 
impulse under which he had bounded off and made his eagle 
flight into the seventh heaven, is exhausted, he returns 
to finish out that sad and gloomy picture, and show the 
deniers of the resurrection what a cheerless contrast they 
were creating to the blessed and glowing hopes of the 
gospel. 

This in general. Let us trace the line of thought more 
particularly. It is simple and easy to follow. There is, 
properly speaking, no reasoning and no attempt at any. The 
apostle speaks simply as one who knows. If the dead rise 
not, Christ is not risen. The resurrection of Christ involves 
the resurrection of his people. The non-resurrection of his 
people argues back to the non-resurrection of their Lord, and 
with this comes tumbling down, in melancholy and hopeless 
ruin, the whole structure of Christian faith and hope. By 
logical necessity, the non-resurrection of Christians involves 
the non-resurrection of Christ. Jesus perished in the sepul- 
chre, and in that same grave are buried all the prospects, 
and hopes, and joys of his followers. The preaching of him 
is vain ; faith in him is vain ; they who have fallen asleep in 
him, have perished ; and his disciples consequently, — such is 
the inevitable inference, — sacrificing the present with no hope 
of the future, the victims of self-denial, suffering, persecution, 
peril, death, are the most miserable of men. Thus far the 
course of thought is transparently clear, nor can there be any 
reasonable doubt as to the import of iAssworspot (more miser- 



THE CONDITION OF CHRISTIANS. 239 

able), with which this section closes. It refers not, certainly 
not primarily, to any subjective and ideal misery, growing 
out of the terrible contrast between the Christian's anticipa- 
tions and the reality. He is not called the most miserable 
of men because, having been exalted so high in hope, he is 
subjected to so dire a disappointment. This were bad 
enough, doubtless, but this is not what the apostle means, and 
is in fact a sort of refining foreign to his mental habits. He 
has in mind a much sterner and more practical, though per- 
haps homelier, truth. He refers to the actual sufferings, 
sacrifices, imminent and deadly perils which encompassed the 
path of the followers of the Crucified. Their Christian pro- 
fession made them universally odious. They were the vic- 
tims, always of hate, and often of persecution. Between 
their own principles and popular proscription, they were cut 
off from nearly the whole circle of worldly pleasures. Stig- 
matized by the communities whose idolatries, vices, and 
pleasures they shunned and reprobated, as bigoted and 
fanatical sectaries ; their peace always, and their lives often, 
in jeopardy ; and so far as safe, safe only because despised, 
their conduct might surely be denounced as supremely fool- 
ish, their lot as supremely miserable, if their hope after all 
was but an illusion and a lie. " The faithful," says Bengel, 
commenting on the passage, " have an intimate, present joy 
in God, and therefore are now happy ; but if there is no 
resurrection, their joy is greatly impaired." Such is not the 
scope of the apostle. He knows no true joy of believers 
apart from the resurrection. Their joy is not merely im- 
paired, it is annihilated. Their hope is not merely circum- 
scribed, it is extinguished. Life and immortality are brought 
to light by the gospel, and guaranteed by the resurrection 



240 BAPTISM FOR THE DEAD. 

of Christ. Expunge that fact, and a heavier than Egyptian 
night resettles on all the region which the gospel had illumi- 
nated, and patriarchs, prophets, and apostles, the Old Cove- 
nant and the New, all belong to one stupendous scheme of 
imposture and illusion. 

Let me not be misunderstood. That Paul actually drank 
deep daily draughts of present spiritual joy, we cannot for a 
moment question. But this does not, cannot, enter into his 
argument, for, deprived of its support in a living Christ, this 
joy is an absolute nullity. The fountain cut off, what becomes 
of the stream ? The Sun of the moral heavens blotted out, 
what are any fancied rays but mockery ? His hope and faith 
deprived of every particle of genuineness and vitality, out- 
lawed from the present world, and with no asylum in the 
future, the Christian sinks into the most miserable of men. 
Let Paul be his own interpreter. " If the dead rise not, why 
stand we in peril every hour ? Why do I die daily ? Why- 
did I contend with the wild beasts of Ephesus ? " We need 
not hesitate therefore. The misery spoken of is no ideal pro- 
duct of the contrast between a glorious hope and a wretched 
realization ; it is the hard, stubborn, palpable, objective mis- 
ery of a life of unrewarded sacrifice, suffering, and danger. 

Here the apostle breaks off. Impatient of dwelling on a 
comfortless and dreary view — and false as comfortless — he 
turns upon his readers the reverse side of the picture — a pic- 
ture glowing with the positive fact of the resurrection of 
Christ, and its blessed consequences in the resurrection of 
his people, and the destruction of man's great enemy, death. 
This affirmative and triumphant strain culminates at ver. 28, 
in the reversion of the world's sovereignty to the hand of ab- 
solute Deity. The impulse which had prompted and borne up 



A NEGATIVE PORTRAITURE. 241 

his flight being exhausted, the apostle then turns back to com- 
plete his negative portraiture. " For," he adds, with his mind 
on the darker hypothesis and its consequences, " what shall 
they do who are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not ? 
Why do even we stand in jeopardy every hour ? I protest, I 
die daily," and so on to the " let us eat and drink, for to-mor- 
row we die." It is thus most apparent that at ver. 29 he re- 
sumes in the same strain in which he had broken off at ver. 
19 : that he is giving the darker aspects of the case, and that 
— certainly with the exception of ver. 19 itself — all is a con- 
tinuation and expansion of the iXeeivorspui {more miserable), 
above. This determines, I think, the commencement of the 
digression, and shows how far back we are to refer the iitet 
(since). Meyer, indeed, denies any digression, and refers the 
i7Zzt to the passage immediately preceding. This is simply 
absurd. The remoter reference is recognized by nearly all the 
commentators, and our analysis makes clear to what it is to be 
referred. The negative view of the case, commenced at ver. 
13, is suspended at ver. 19, and after the interposition of the 
positive view, is resumed in the same strain at ver. 29, and 
carried forward to the emphatic " Be not deceived," etc., of 
ver. 33. 

It is not necessary, indeed, to maintain that the apostle, in 
resuming with &icet, had a definite reference to any particular 
passage or expression. It is sufficient that his mind was 
filled with the general idea of the wretched consequences 
flowing from the denial of the resurrection, and that, after 
having fully set forth the positive and glowing fact, he now 
returns to complete the darker delineation, and show fully to 
the Corinthian speculators over how dreary a gulf they were 
hanging. With this general thought filling his mind, and 

V 



242 BAPTISM FOR THE DEAD. 

crowding for utterance, nothing would be more natural than 
to resume really as if the thread had not been broken, while 
in fact ver. 29 is connected not so much with ver. 19 as with 
the idea in his mind out of which both spring. 

At all events ver. 29 really takes up the thought where the 
ihsivorspot (more miserable) had left it, and carries it forward 
with a natural development. Passing over our present pas- 
sage, how unmistakably true is this of all the rest! Why 
stand we in peril every hour ? "I die daily," i. e., my daily 
life is but a daily dying. "If after the manner of men 
merely, with no hope of a hereafter, I fought with wild beasts 
at Ephesus, what advantageth it me ? " And how natural 
the crowning conclusion, " If the dead rise not, let us eat and 
drink, for to-morrow we die ! " 

We are justified in taking this entire negative together as 
constituting a coherent whole. Look at the " more miserable " 
above ; look at that series of expressions which form its com- 
mentary below. Let us briefly sum up the whole, and see how 
simple, natural, harmonious, and forcible the line of thought. 
" No resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen. Then 
is your faith vain : then they that have fallen asleep in Christ 
have perished. Then we Christians, with our numberless 
sacrifices and sufferings, are the most miserable of men. For 
what, in that case, will they gain who are baptized for the 
dead ? Why do also we encounter peril every hour ? Why 
do I die daily ? Why did I contend with the wild beasts of 
Ephesus? All our sufferings, exposures, dangers, how utterly 
gratuitous ! Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die ! " 
Now I ask, in all earnestness, what place in this line of 
thought for such an idea as that of baptizing living persons 
for the benefit of dead ones? I leave out of the account 



A FUTILE REFERENCE. 243 

the intrinsic grossness of the superstition ; the utter improb- 
ability of its existing at Corinth ; the still greater improb- 
ability of Paul's alluding to it with seeming favor ; the futil- 
ity of the argument in itself. But, I ask, what makes it 
here ? What connection or coherence has it with the line of 
thought ? What is it but an impertinent intruder, marring 
the symmetry and disturbing the course, as well as degrading 
the dignity, of the apostle's natural and just appeal ? All the 
rest is legitimate ; this is illegitimate. All the rest declares that 
without the resurrection Christians are pre-eminently miser- 
able. This declares that, without the resurrection, a certain 
superstitious observance loses its significance. All in the con- 
nection goes to show that the Christian's lot, apart from the 
resurrection, is peculiarly wretched. This would show no such 
thing. The most that can be said of this is, that it is a mere 
nullity — that neither Principal nor Substitute has either gained 
or lost any thing by the transaction. Both are just as well 
off as before, and the reference is as completely out of place 
in the connection, as it is futile in respect to argument, and 
improbable as to the fact. 

The phrase " baptized for the dead," ought, it should seem, 
in its place, to refer in some way to those sufferings and woes 
to which Christianity subjects its votaries. Nothing but this 
fits into the context. And, I add, the form of expression — 
the manner in which the passage is coupled with the follow- 
ing, leads to the same conclusion. " Why are they baptized 
for the dead ? Why do also we stand in peril every hour ? " 
It is impossible to avoid the conviction that these two sen- 
tences stand in close connection as to the thought : that one 
continues, explains, or modifies the other ; that it is either the 
expression in literal language of what the other has expressed 



244 BAPTISM FOB THE DEAD. 

figuratively, or a more restricted statement of what the other 
has declared generally. Two ideas of so diverse a character 
as that of a gross superstition and legitimate and noble Chris- 
tian exposure, cannot be thus yoked together by a writer even 
more careless and unstudied than Paul. Paul often obscures 
his logic by terse and abrupt expression, but he does not 
thus force together ideas logically unrelated and incoherent. 
"Baptized for the dead " ought in the connection, to express 
an idea akin to those of the "stand in jeopardy," "die," 
"fought with wild beasts," that follow, and altogether are 
natural developments of the " more miserable," their starting 
point above. 

I have thus far dealt with the facts and the logic of the mat- 
ter. I have looked at the historical evidence, the nature of 
the usage, and finally at the logical exigencies of the passage. 
I regard this last evidence as decisive, both as to what the 
meaning of the passage is not, and what it is. We have no 
right, indeed, to force our own meaning into an author's train 
of thought, but we have a right to draw his meaning out of 
it. We may rightly presume that he will lead us toward the 
goal toward which his footsteps are regularly tending. We 
may surely make logical consistency an important element in 
interpretation. Man is something more than a mere gram- 
mar-grinder. The lexicon is not the whole of exegesis. 
Logic and rhetoric — the law of thought and the law of pas- 
sion — are mightier than grammar, and will ever furnish the 
most decisive elements in the interpretation of human speech. 
We can never rest in our exposition until the logical demands 
of the passage are satisfied. However seemingly encompassed 
in grammatical rules, it will refuse to lie still, but will arise 
and haunt us with the ghost of a murdered thought. When, 



AN EXCLUDING ANALYSIS. 245 

on the contrary, the difficulties of thought have resolved 
themselves, we easily dispose, especially in an energetic aud 
impassioned writer, of some difficulties of expression. Not, 
however, that we here encounter any serious difficulties of 
expression. We shall find the language easily yielding to 
the demand of the thought. 

The same analysis of the train of thought which rules out 
the idea of baptizing living persons for dead ones, excludes 
some other explanations intrinsically much less objectionable. 
If this analysis is just, the passage ought to have reference in 
some way to the folly of Christian sacrifices and sufferings, in 
case the dead do net rise, for this is here the scope of the apos- 
tle's thought. Christians, by all the hardships and perils which 
their profession entails upon them, are by so much worse off 
than other men — this is here the burden of his thought — the 
last thought with which he broke off at ver. 19, and the only 
thought which he dwells upon after ver. 29. The explana- 
tion, therefore, often adopted, " baptized for [the resurrection 
of] the dead," though easily drawn from the words by a nat- 
ural ellipsis, and in itself a pertinent and forcible question, is 
not pertinent just here. The apostle is not arguing for the 
resurrection from the import of rites and ceremonies, whether 
regular or heretical, but simply showing how completely 
wretched its denial makes the believer. But a baptism for 
the resurrection of the dead, if the dead do not rise, is merely 
a nullity. Like the heretical baptism before spoken of, it 
leaves the person precisely where it found him. It amounts 
to nothing either way. His condition is no better and no 
worse : or, rather, if that were all, it would be better, for he 
has his hope in the present life, and then — why, "out of 
nothing nothing can arise, not even sorrow." The explanation 



246 BAPTISM FOR THE DEAD. 

then is inappropriate. The question which the apostle should 
ask, is not, Why are they baptized for the resurrection of the 
dead ? but, Why are they baptized for the dead ? Not, Why 
in baptism do they look beyond the grave ? but, Why in bap- 
tism do they devote themselves to the grave? Why do they 
undergo a baptism which brings them into sure alliance with 
the dead, if the dead have no resurrection? Why hasten to 
that goal, if that goal is nothingness or destruction ? 

And this thought, so appropriate to the context, and so ger- 
mane to the argument of the apostle, lies, I believe, on the 
very face of the expression ; may be drawn out from it by no 
violent process. Before inquiring how this may be done, let 
us look for a moment at the meaning of the word uxip. It 
first means over, locally, but in this sense is unknown to the 
New Testament. It means, secondly, on behalf of, for the sake 
of, (over, for defense,) and then by a slight extension, in refer- 
ence to, in relation to; the two classes of meanings so playing 
into each other that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish 
them. Of both uses, however, the instances are abundant. In 
the latter sense (in reference to), it differs from i:spi, concern- 
ing, as implying an interest in the person or thing referred to. 
Thus any person might speak Ttep) ypa^q, concerning an indict- 
ment, but onep T7)q ypacpTjq naturally only one of the interested 
parties. The fundamental idea in all such cases of bn£p is that 
it brings the parties into close relation with its object, the pre- 
cise nature of the relation, whether friendly or antagonistic, 
being determined by the circumstances. Of another possible, 
but very rare meaning of bnip, as equivalent to fori, instead of, 
I doubt if there is any clearly authenticated case in the New 
Testament. The passages where it is so rendered admit easily 
the meaning on behalf of. " Baptized for the dead " then is, 



DIFFERENT INTERPRETATIONS. 247 

with no straining of the words, baptized into relation to the 
dead, baptized so as to be allied with the dead, reckoned 
among the dead rather than among the living. The extreme 
brevity and abruptness of the expression may make it doubt- 
ful in what precise way its general import is best evolved. I 
glance at two or three explanations. 

1. Bengel explains, baptized over the dead, not literally, 
but figuratively — baptized, as it were, overhanging the dead 
— with death and the dead immediately before one. This, in 
one of his applications, viz., to martyrs, would be in keeping 
here. But it is harsh, and may be dismissed as improbable. 

2. We have, again, Rosenmiiller's interpretation, " Qui se 
maximis vitoe periculis exponunt ut moriantur " (they who 
expose themselves to such dangers of life as that they die). 
This takes jSaTzri^aj figuratively — overwhelmed, plunged in 
affliction and peril for the sake of, so as to ally themselves to, 
the dead. This construction I incline to believe possible. The 
figurative uses of PaitriZeiv in Greek are abundant, and not 
always with any determining object in the immediate con- 
nection. Nor is it easy to say how far the striking language 
of our Lord to his disciples in regard to his and their baptism 
of suffering, may have influenced the use of the word among 
primitive Christians. Nor is the harshness of the connection 
with uxep zu)v vexpmvj in our view, an insuperable objection to 
this meaning, which, of course, fits perfectly to what follows. 
Still, in the absence of clear cases of like usage, it is safer, 
perhaps, to take the verb literally. 

3. We have then, thirdly, two ideas, either of which may 
be drawn out of the phrase. The first makes it have respect 
to the universal significance and effect of baptism, in that 
Christians, by their baptism on the one hand, renounce all 



248 BAPTISM FOR THE DEAD. 

the pleasures and enjoyments of life, thus linking themselves 
ideally to the dead, and on the other at once subject them- 
selves to the peril of death, and bind themselves to maintain 
their fidelity at the expense of life. Such was emphatically 
the condition of primitive baptism. In other senses than the 
purely spiritual, they who were baptized into Christ, were 
baptized into death. The very condition of discipleship was 
taking up the cross, having the sentence of death in them- 
selves, — a devoting of themselves to death. Thus their bap- 
tism, as the symbol of their Christian profession, was both in 
its ideal character, as a denial of the pleasures and interests 
of life, and in its actual character, as exposing them to suffer- 
ing and peril, from which they must not shrink, emphatically 
a baptism for the dead. 

There are two objections to this interpretation : First, of a 
literal baptism, we might expect the participle fianTtadivTez, 
rather than the continued present ^anri^oiievot. But to this 
we may reply, that while each baptism was a single event, the 
apostle, looking at a series or succession of baptisms, would 
naturally use the present. The other objection is, that the 
form of expression, " What will they do who are baptized," 
etc., seems naturally to apply to only a portion of Christians, 
to separate a part from the whole. He should have said, 
" What shall we do," etc. For this we have, perhaps, no en- 
tirely satisfactory answer. We might indeed regard the ol 
fianrtZo/isvm as a descriptive term, standing here for all 
Christians, and employed precisely Because it here suits the 
writer's purpose. An American might be writing of some 
duty devolving upon his countrymen as republicans, and as 
a synonym for the entire body say, " For those who profess 
democratic principles, cannot but," etc. The "those who 



EXPOSURE TO MARTYRDOM. 249 

profess " would here be co-extensive with the previous term 
" Americans," and so the ol ISanrc^dfxsvo: ma}' here be co-ex- 
tensive with the whole body of Christians, as universally de- 
scriptive of them. In this way I deem it possible to regard 
the passage as applicable to all Christians — especially of that 
early time — in that feature of their Christian profession which 
made it virtually a taking up of the cross, and allying them- 
selves to the dead. 

But, secondly, it may refer, as ol fiaizn'oitzvot would natu- 
rally indicate, not to the whole body of Christians, but only 
to a part. It then denotes, not the necessary condition of all 
baptism, but the baptism of those whom their Christian pro- 
fession subjected to actual suffering, peril, and perhaps martyr- 
dom. Of these, especially of such as underwent death for 
Christ's sake, it would surely be no harsh language to say 
that they were " baptized for the dead " ; that they under- 
went a baptism which destined them for and allied them to 
the dead. As to the thought, look at the apostle's frequent 
language elsewhere, " God hath set forth us the apostles last, 
as it were appointed unto death " ; " For always we that live 
are delivered unto death " ; "I die daily " ; " In deaths oft." 
And take the entire passage, 2 Cor. 11 : 23-28, as an em- 
phatic commentary on the idea of being baptized for the dead 
and the whole following portion of the passage. And as to 
the expression, it is determined by the subject about which 
the apostle is writing. His mind is here on the dead (ol 
vexpoi) with reference to their resurrection, and nothing would 
be more natural for him than to assimilate the phraseology 
in which he describes deadly suffering to the language of the 
context, and thus to set over against the resurrection of the 
dead a "baptism for the dead" as emphatically and justly 



250 BAPTISM FOR THE DEAD. 

descriptive of their earthly life, at least of that of himself 
and his fellow-preachers and propagators of the gospel, who, 
wherever they went, went in the very face of martyrdom. 
The figure is an energetic, impassioned one, but by no means 
unnatural. 

I confess I feel half disposed to adopt Rosemmiller's figu- 
rative interpretation, and to regard the verb, thus used, as 
sufficiently explained by the context. But the literal expla- 
nation is perhaps easier, yields an equally good sense, and is 
only less rhetorically forcible. That idea is, baptized for the 
dead — baptized into relation to the dead, so baptized as that 
they belong, by sacrifice, suffering, peril, martyrdom, rather 
to the dead than to the living, and are thus the victims of a 
fate which has no alleviation nor apology, except in the 
resurrection. And I trust I have shown the utter untenable- 
ness of that interpretation which refers the passage to a usage 
elsewhere unheard of in the New Testament, nor heard of in 
the church for three centuries afterward, and heard of then 
only among some ignorant and fanatical sectaries. 

I close with two remarks : first, I ask attention to the sim- 
plicity of my interpretation. It is not elaborate and far- 
fetched. It depends on no subtle and ingenious combina- 
tions. I have not brought it from afar. I have not ascended 
into heaven to bring it down from above, nor descended into 
the deep to bring it up from beneath. The word is nigh us. 
We reach it by the simplest evolution of the writer's thought. 
It lies on the very face of the passage, and is the only solu- 
tion which clears the thought of the writer, while nothing in 
the language repels us from it. If the mere literal, me- 
chanical structure of the words, without thought of history, 
logic, or intrinsic force, favors the view of Alford and De 



THE APOSTOLIC AFFIRMATION. 251 

Wette, a slight regard to that impassioned element which 
enters so largely into the st) 7 le of Paul, makes our explana- 
tion easy and natural. And if Paul might be expected to 
speak with impassioned energy anywhere, it would be in 
dealing with the deniers of the resurrection. 

Once more: I would dwell a moment on the common 
fallacy that Paul is adducing a series of arguments in proof 
of the resurrection. Nothing can be more unfounded. When 
he comes to the mode of the resurrection, he cites two or three 
analogies which give his discussion the appearance — though 
it is little but the appearance — of an argument. But here 
there is not the shadow of any argument in the proper sense 
of the term. The apostle simply affirms on the one hand 
that without the resurrection there is no risen Christ, no 
Christian hope, and all is gloom, wretchedness and despair ; 
and on the other affirms the resurrection of Christ with its 
glorious consequences in the resurrection of his people, and 
the destruction of death. There are simply two authoritative 
statements, — negatively, that the non-resurrection of the dead 
implies the non-resurrection of Christ ; positively, that there 
is a resurrection of Christ, guaranteeing the resurrection of 
his people. All is involved in this. On the negative side 
the course of thought is : If Christ is not risen, Christian 
hope is vain, Christian sacrifices and sufferings are futile; 
the Christian's lot is supremely wretched, and his baptism 
for the dead bin; plunges him prematurely into that sleep of 
death which knows no awakening, that night of the grave on 
which dawns no morrow. 

It seems to me that the language in which our Lord de- 
scribes figuratively the Christian life, ought to have suggested 
the right interpretation regarding this passage. The Saviour 



252 BAPTISM FOR THE DEAD. 

goes through life and makes his way toward the grave under 
the shadow of the cross. With him, therefore, the consecra- 
tion and the life of his followers is a taking upon themselves 
and a bearing of the cross. The apostles do not live generally 
in prospect of crucifixion, but are exposed to nameless and 
numberless forms of death by persecution ; to them the 
natural and inevitable solace for their suffering is the now 
revealed hope of the resurrection. Thus then, the baptism 
which pledges them to the grave, opens to them that glorious 
resurrection in which death is swallowed up and extinguished. 



XVI. 
PREACHING TO THE SPIRITS IN PRISON. 

1 Peter 3: 18-20; 4: 6. 

* *T)EING put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the 
-13 spirit, in which also he went and preached to the 
spirits in prison, though they had at one time disobeyed (him) 
when the long-suffering of God was waiting in the days of 
Noah, while an ark was being prepared. 

For, for this cause the good tidings were published to the 
dead, that though they had been judged according to men in 
the flesh, they might live according to God in the Spirit." 

" No preaching to the dead," was the energetic title of a 
sometime article in a religious Quarterly, controverting the 
view of Christ's personal preaching to the spirits in prison. 
Inasmuch as Peter declares expressly that there was preach- 
ing to the dead, the title seems a little unhappy, as half sug- 
gesting that, in his vehement championship, the author would 
venture to break a lance even with the apostle. Of course he 
had no such purpose. The question was with him, as with all 
of us, as to the sacred writer's meaning, and this determined, 
the controversy is closed. He would doubtless simply empha- 
size his conviction as to what was, in these celebrated passages, 
the purpose of the apostle. Under every view, however, the 
question of the import of our passage is a very serious one ; 
not merely grammatically interesting, but as touching, per- 
haps vitally, the final destiny of a portion of the race, and 

W 253 



254 PREACHING TO THE SPIRITS IN PRISON. 

hence difficult to be treated with entire impartiality. The 
advocate of " eternal hope," welcomes it as letting in a ray of 
light on the darkness of the final prison house. To him who 
holds that death seals irrevocably human destiny, the very 
consistency of Scripture seems almost to urge an escape from 
the obvious import of our passage. 

Is there such an escape? Can the present passage be 
diverted from its apparent import? I do not see how it 
altogether can be, and have long felt in a strait betwixt my 
conviction that the Scriptures close, to those who die unre- 
pentant, the hope of salvation, and that, according to our 
passage, the crucified and risen Lord carried personally a 
gracious message to, at least, some disobedient victims of the 
Flood. I shall give my views upon the passage, under the 
conviction that no candid discussion can be ultimately harm- 
ful. I take in order the several points. 

" Being put to death in the flesh," i. e., as a man ; dying 
under the conditions of humanity ; subject to its sufferings ; 
to the violent severing of soul and body; his body being 
yielded to the tomb, and his spirit departing to the receptacle 
of the righteous dead in Hades. 

" Made alive in the spirit." The word " spirit " answers to 
" flesh." He was so made alive that he was delivered from 
the bondage of the flesh, its sufferings and temptations raised, 
not as a mere spirit, but purged from all fleshly elements, 
etherialized, spiritualized, so that body and soul acted in 
harmony, as a predominantly spiritual nature. 

" In which also he went and preached," i. e., in which 
spiritualized condition, and thus, after his resurrection, and 
not before it. In the condition designated by irvsu/nart he 
went and made proclamation to the spirits in prison. The 



POST-RESURRECTION PREACHING. 255 

words " in which," imply that it was in bis risen state ; the 
" going " (xopeu&etq) implies a personal going, and not acting 
through another. The verb and participle, ("going, be 
preached,") " he went and preached," might, through the 
elasticity of the Greek aorist, with no violence to the Greek 
idiom, be rendered " he had gone and preached," thus throw- 
ing back the preaching into a former time, as for example, 
into the time of Noah. But this is here forbidden by the 
context ; as for instance the " in which" that naturally limits 
the time to that of the resurrection, and certainly by the 
" going " ; which is of necessity understood of a personal 
going, and would be most unnatural if spoken of a preaching 
by Christ through Noah. 1 

With many able commentators (as Bengel, De Wette, 
Wiesinger, and Huther), I thus place the preaching after 
the resurrection; in that completed condition of soul and 
body in which the Lord had risen. Nor to those who hold 
that he went now on a mission of salvation, is the distinction 
unimportant. Such a mission, whatever its sphere, would be 
far more appropriate to his risen than to his unrisen state. 
Before the resurrection he was still the victim of death, and 
still in bondage to the tomb. He could not go into Hades to 
proclaim victory to others, so long as his own body was yet 
lying a prisoner of the grave. He was still in a state of hu- 
miliation ; in fact, he was already in Hades, and thus the 

1 Eph. 2 : 17. " And he came and preached to you," has been cited against this ; 
but the " you " means here, the collective Gentiles in contrast with the Jews, and 
the reference is clearly to Christ's personal coming to earth as the publisher cf a 
common peace. Equally irrelevant is the reference in support of such a use of 
"going" to Gen. 11 : 7, where Jehovah says, " Let us go down and confound their 
language." The language here is simply anthropomorphic and figurative, and 
could no more be used in illustration of this passage than could his " riding on the 
■wind," or, " going up with the sound of a trumpet." 



256 PREACHING TO THE SPIRITS IN PRISON. 

captive of its monarch. True, he bore with him, as a spirit- • 
ual trophy, to the underworld, the pardoned robber to whom 
he had said : " To-day thou shalt be with me in Paradise." 
True, also, in the very moment of his death-struggle he re- 
leased in anticipative victory, some of its victims. Yet he 
had not escaped the bitter and humiliating cup which he 
came to drink. He died as a man ; as a man he yielded his 
body to the tomb ; as a man — a human soul — he went into 
that region of Hades allotted to the righteous, viz., Paradise, 
the home of the happy dead, answering to the Elysium of the 
Greeks. Thither our Lord would naturally go, and thither 
the pardoned malefactor would naturally accompany him, 
The robber's salvation was the effect of Christ's saving 
power ; but, when saved, he and his redeeming Lord found 
the same temporary abode, where the Lord of course re- 
mained until his resurrection ; his companion remained, as 
doubtless all others will, until his own and the general 
resurrection. 

It is not strange that, by the mass of readers, the going of 
Christ's spirit at his death, into the realm of the happy dead, 
should be confounded with the celebrated "descensus ad 
inferos" — the going among the imprisoned spirits, — of our 
epistle. The nearness, almost identity, of time, and a certain 
vague relationship of place, led naturally to the confusion. 
But a scholar, like Archdeacon Farrar, has no excuse for 
affirming that "the only passage which proves the 'descent 
into hell' of the 'Apostle's Creed' is this passage of St. 
Peter." In reality the two have nothing to do with each 
other, and the imagery of Acts 2 : 27, " Thou wilt not leave 
my soul in Hades," (wilt not abandon me to the grave,) is 
doubtless the parent of that familiar conception. Certainly 



THE MESSAGE BORNE. 257 

Christ's accompanying the saved thief to Paradise stands in 
no relation to any mission to the disobedient dead. 1 

And in his intermediate state he was in no formal position 
to convey any message of saving mercy. He was not yet, so 
to speak, saved himself. Only after his resurrection could 
he go with the tokens of his victory — his emancipated body, 
and his perfectly spiritualized nature — into any quarter of 
the realm of God. 

But now what was his message, and whither did he bear 
it ? He went and preached to the " spirits in prison." The 
" preaching " is supposed by a few commentators, who recog- 
nize the difficulty of making the preaching any other than 
that of the personal Christ, to be an announcement of judg- 
ment and condemnation. But such an errand is scarcely 
conceivable in this glad morning of the completed redemp- 
tion ; the general usage of the New Testament leads, if not 
requires us, with nearly all scholars, to understand the word 
of a gracious declaration ; and this view is confirmed by the 
language in the following chapter : " For this cause the 
gospel was preached (the glad tidings were announced) to 
the dead," a passage which seems to have the same reference 
with that which we are considering. 

1 If from Paradise the soul of Jesus went to the realm of woe, it would seem 
much like Lazarus' going from the bosom of Abraham to minister to the tormented 
Dives. Lazarus was in Paradise ; Dives was in Gehenna ; both were in Hades. A 
little reflection would have spared a late writer the remark, about equally illogical 
and irreverent: " The Lord's declaration, ' To-day thou sbalt be with me in Para- 
dise,' was not comforting, if Christ was going that day to the realm of lost spirits." 
Of course this passage asserts no such visit of Christ's disembodied spirit to 
Gehenna; such an interpretation is a mere tour deforce; but if it had, the chasm 
which, under the local imagery of the Gospel (Luke 16) could be conversed across, 
however impassable to an ordinary earth-born foot, would have proved no obstacle 
to him who in death was still the Son of God ; and irrespective of our little specu- 
lations, the dying robber, wherever his Lord led the way, would have felt and 
found it safe to follow him. 



258 PREACHING TO THE SPIRITS IN PRISON. 

The persons preached to were the " spirits in prison," 
guilty spirits apparently, shut up for judgment or for trial. 
That it does not denote the entire body of lost spirits is 
shown by the subjoined participle, with its clause, which 
designates them as victims of the flood. The complex 
phrase naturally describes their condition at the time of the 
preaching, and thus along with the clause, " in which he 
went," etc., forbids our referring it to the time of Noah, 
when the persons preached to were neither " spirits," nor " in 
prison," but men and women living in the flesh. But may 
not the writer, we are asked, have referred to these persons 
in their later, and then present condition, to which their dis- 
obedience had consigned them ? Nothing certainly in what 
precedes suggests such a strange mode of describing the lis- 
teners to Noah's preaching. Nothing, if Christ did not go 
and preach to them, comes out of it in what follows. Nothing 
indicates it in the language ; no such form of expression as 
" the spirits now in prison," or, " those who had become 
spirits in prison " ; nothing whatever declares or implies that 
the spirits in question do not appear in the form and locality 
in which the preaching was addressed. Nothing intimates 
that they are proleptically designated from the foreseen con- 
sequences of their disobedience. 

We are told indeed that the writer, in the glow of composi- 
tion, has caught the word " spirits," as a sort of echo from 
the " spirit " condition in which the Lord addressed them — 
" he went in spirit, and preached to the spirits," etc. This 
were conceivable, but the term would be simply a figure, and 
the language should be conformed to the thought, — he went in 
spirit and preached through Noah to the disobedient spirits 
of the flood. Or, if the term " spirits " called up their sub- 



THE SUBJOINED PARTICIPLE. 259 

sequent doom and dwelling place, and led him, abandoning 
the figure, to speak of them as literal spirits, then again, as 
before, something in the language should explain it, and indi- 
cate their connection with the rebellious spirits of the flood. 
Some particle of time thrown in, should indicate the identity 
of the two classes. As it is, nothing appears thus far to con- 
nect them ; nothing that shows why the apostle should say 
that Christ " went and preached to the spirits in prison," 
when or after " they disobeyed him in the days of Noah," 
instead of saying in a straightforward way, that he, in the 
days of Noah, preached through him to the people of the 
flood, and then referred, if he had occasion to, to the fate 
which their disobedience brought upon them, bat which again 
would be somewhat singularly described by the term here 
employed. That fate w 7 as temporal destruction ; it might 
well be supposed also, spiritual destruction. But the descrip- 
tive phrase which is entirely appropriate to designate a select 
class of persons to whom, as shut up to special judgment, the 
Lord had gone on a special mission, is singularly inappropri- 
ate as a description without anything further of the subjects 
of the preaching of the deluge. Even if made intelligible by 
some particle of time, it would still be unapparent why they 
should be precisely so designated. And as a simple, bald 
description of the subjects of Noah's preaching, it remains 
absolutely unaccountable ; at once unnatural in thought, and 
preposterous in expression. 

But does not the subjoined participle (with its adjunct 
itori, at one time) come to the rescue of the partisans of the 
theory I am opposing, connecting the spirits with the time of 
Noah, and implying that they were the subjects of his 
preaching? This implication it undoubtedly makes. It 



260 PREACHING TO THE SPIRITS IN PRISON. 

shows that these spirits — wheresoever Christ preached to 
them — were subjects in the flesh of the preaching of Noah. 
But while connecting the spirits with the time of Noah, does 
it also so connect the preaching with the preaching of Noah 
as to make the two identical ? Here is a critical part of the 
argument, and much pains has been taken to show that we 
have here a predicate, and not an attributive participle, and 
that this decides the time of our Lord's preaching, to the 
time of Noah. The predicate character of the participle is 
unquestionable, but it makes for the other side of the question. 
I will state, as succinctly as I can, the differences of the two 
classes of participles, a difference familiar to Greek scholars. 
The attributive participle (participle with article) defines 
and describes its substantive — (as, nnq nveufiaat roTq fibrec- 
$-q<ra<nv, the spirits that disobeyed). The predicate, circum- 
stantial (anarthrous participle, following a definite substan- 
tive),* as already defined and known, adds to it, as already 
defined, a circumstance or quality (as rolq tzvsvimujiv 
dxeiftij<rafftv, the spirits on, or after, or although, disobeying). 
So the present or continuous participle, as 6 dvrjp 6 tlolcov, the 
man who is (or was) doing ; 6 avyp tzoiwv, the man while (or 
when) doing. The predicate participle is often, though by 
no means always, accompanied in rendering by some limiting 
particle — the aorist, in accordance with its vague nature, 
more variously than the present, with, when, by, on, after, 
although (instrumental, concessive, causal, etc.). But in all 
cases, whether present or aorist, whether preceding or follow- 
ing the verb, the characteristic difference of the two classes 
remains. The one defines and describes, the other assumes 
and incidentally characterizes. The one is united by its arti- 
cle directly with the noun ; the other is in some sort dissoci- 



TWO HYPOTHESES. 261 

ated from its noun, and united more closely with the verb, 
giving some condition of, reason for, or perhaps result of, its 
action. 

AVe have now in regard to the present passage, two hy- 
potheses. In the one, Christ and Noah are one conjoint 
preacher, centuries anterior to the time of the writer, to 
which latter time belongs that of the " spirits in prison." In 
the other, Christ and the " spirits in prison " belong both to 
the same recent time. There are however, two separate 
preachings, one that of Christ, expressly declared ; the other 
that of Noah, implied with attending disobedience. 

In the former hypothesis, as no particle of time or form of 
expression has identified these spirits with the people of the 
flood, they would naturally be brought into relation to them 
by an attributive participle (the spirits in prison who were dis- 
obedient, etc.). Still, while such a participle would connect 
the two classes, it would not necessarily connect the two 
preachings. It would allow them as imprisoned spirits to 
receive the preaching of Christ ; while yet, as unimprisoned 
spirits, they had in the flesh received and rejected the preach- 
ing of Noah. Neither, therefore, of the two attributive par- 
ticiples — either the present (who were disobeying), or the 
aorist (who had disobeyed), would serve the purpose of the 
first hypothesis. Either would be quite compatible with the 
second. 

The predicate participle, we remember, dissociates itself 
from the noun, and connects itself with the verb. The pred- 
icate then connects the disobedience directly with the preach- 
ing. It reminds us, certainly, that the spirits here preached 
to had been disobedient in the days of Noah, and it may tell 
us that they were preached to while they were disobeying in 



262 PREACHING TO THE SPIRITS IN PRISON. 

the days of Noah. In other words, the predicate participle 
may make not only the subjects of the preaching or preach- 
ings, but the preaching and the preachers identical. The 
preaching of Christ might have been through Noah. But 
for this it would matter what predicate participle is used, the 
present or the aorist. 

The present would be : " he preached to them while they 
were disobeying," etc. The aorist : " he preached to them on 
their disobeying," or " when, after, although, they had dis- 
obeyed." The former unites the preachers, and brings the 
disobeying side by side with the preaching. The other, in its 
usual and natural construction, would bring the disobedience 
into relation to the preaching indeed, but not a relation of 
simultaneous time ; it would throw back the disobedience to 
a former time, and to an implied former preaching, of which 
it had been the attendant. 

Now of these two predicate participles, the one (the pre- 
sent) which would favor and perhaps necessitate the first 
hypothesis — that of the Christo-Noachian preaching — is pre- 
cisely that which is not used. The one, on the contrary, which 
does not necessitate it ; which does not even favor it ; which 
only doubtfully allows it; which nearly necessitates the 
second, is that which is used. " He preached to them while 
they were disobeying," anst&ooffiv, would require the first. He 
preached to them when, after, although, they had disobeyed; 
aTTsiftr)(ja<nv, requires the second. There is only one way of ren- 
dering the aorist, viz. (when they disobeyed; or, participially, 
disobeying once), which is possibly compatible with the first, 
and this is so harsh as to be nearly impossible. It takes the 
"when" which so often introduces the aorist in translation, 
as ore, a particle of simultaneous time for which the aorist is 



THE CONDITIONS RECALLED. 263 

hardly ever used. The " when " with which our English version 
often introduces it, and often unfortunately, scarcely ever ex- 
presses mere simultaneousness, and generally implies it as a 
precedent or condition of the following action in fact or con- 
ception. Of all the four participial constructions the writer 
has refrained from the only one which would have required 
the first hypothesis, and employed the particular one which 
speaks most strougly for the other, whose most natural ren- 
derings, when, after, although, they had disobeyed, almost 
necessitates the hypothesis we advocate. Let me recall the 
conditions : A divinely enjoined preaching by Noah (which 
we learn of elsewhere) long ages ago to the men of his time, 
to which in refusing to listen they had been overwhelmed by 
the flood ; a like preaching now, by the risen and personal 
Christ, readdressed to those now imprisoned spirits, notwith- 
standing their old-time disobedience. All this is implied in 
our passage, and to it every word is adjusted. The par- 
tide, ttoTi, aforetime, attached to a disobeying that was 
simultaneous with the preaching, is meaningless; but, at- 
tached to a disobeying that was centuries anterior to this 
later preaching, is eminently natural. In the other case it 
should have been united with rw"? anetftooaiv. As it stands 
the parts fit exactly to our interpretation. The concessive 
aorist participle, throwing with its nori the disobedience 
indefinitely back ; but this indefiniteness again limited by the 
ore, " when the long suffering of God was waiting,' 1 etc. 

The attributive aorist, I have already remarked, would 
have been perfectly compatible with our view. Nothing would 
have prevented the author from saying : " who had disobeyed 
him, toIc dTtctftrjaaaiVy in the days of Noah " ; but it would 
have been simply compatible with it. The aorist predicate 



264 PEE ACHING TO THE SPIRITS IN PRISON. 

converts a fact into a reason ; the participle becomes logical 
instead of merely historical. It reminds us why the Lord might 
have been expected not to carry his merciful message to those 
spirits who had turned their backs on his earlier preaching 
through the lips of Noah. 

It is in vain then that defenders of the hypothesis of 
Christ's Noachian preaching have resorted for proof to the 
use of the predicate participle. Both the fact and the gen- 
eral force of the distinction of the two participles is, I sup- 
pose, beyond doubt, though its importance in individual cases 
may be easily exaggerated. And we may easily see why De 
Wette, Alford, and Lange have, without doing violence to 
their argument — at least without lack of scholarly candor — 
disregarded here the predicative force of the participle. The 
attributive, had it been used, would have been perfectly 
proper, and made nothing against their and our construction. 
It would simply have failed to tell, as does the predicate, 
strongly in their favor. They simply relinquished, carelessly 
or otherwise, one of the strong points in the cause they advo- 
cated. But this failure does not make the case itself less 
strong. With their theory, predicate or attributive is equally 
possible, though not equally significant. With the other it 
is nearly incompatible. 

On the whole what do we find to favor the hypothesis of 
the Noachian preaching as identical with that of our passage? 
What, rather, that does not tend strongly against it ? Is it 
the h $, in which, which if all else required it, we might 
concede to the preincarnate and Logos era, but which is most 
naturally determined by the preceding vveoiiari to the post- 
incarnate epoch ? The nopeudnic;, which points only to a per- 
sonal, literal going ? The " spirits in prison " to whom we 



THE GRAMMATICAL MEANING. 265 

are told expressly that our Lord went and preached, and to 
whom Noah did not preach, except by a prolepsis which, un- 
explained, is of intolerable harshness ? The aorist predicate 
participle, which should have been the present? The icori 
which should have been joined with ixypuzev, or exchanged for 
totsI The verb aizuftiw itself, which, instead of being 
confined to the antediluvian disobedience to Noah, should 
have given way to a word expressing that gigantic old-world 
corruption which provoked both the preaching of Noah and 
the deluge that followed it ? I may add, the singularly indi- 
rect and awkward way in which the great " Preacher of Kight- 
eousness " is introduced, if he was the immediate preacher of 
Peter's present description, as he certainly was. in that which 
these spirits had formerly disobeyed ? In fine, if the sentence 
was intended to express the preaching of Christ through 
Noah, I do not see how it could well have gone more com- 
pletely awry. If it was intended to declare the personal 
preaching of Christ, renewed to spirits that had perished 
under an old-time disobedience to a preaching from the same 
ultimate source, and now renewed in spite of that disobedience, 
the writer has with great brevity, and with a skillful use of 
the delicacies of the Greek idiom, perfectly accomplished 
it. Grammatically everything is in its place. Our way is 
blocked, if at all, by the difficulties of the thought. These 
I have no wish to belittle. The apostle has left them in 
obscurity from which we might well wish the veil had been 
lifted. But, if the language has not its obvious import, he 
has given us a puzzle in construction to which the " things 
hard to be understood " of his beloved brother Paul do not 
furnish many parallels. Paul's constructions are sometimes 
tangled, but not often misleading. 

x 



266 PREACHING TO THE SPIRITS IN PRISON. 

And, waiving doctrinal difficulties, our interpretation cer- 
tainly harmonizes with the apostle's line of argument. The 
duty of repaying evil with well-doing is forcibly illustrated 
by the Saviour's dying, the just for the unjust; and not less 
strikingly illustrated by his going immediately on leaving the 
tomb to which human wickedness had consigned him, and 
making a proclamation of mercy to those who had formerly, 
through a long period, disregarded a like message ultimately, 
though not immediately, from the same high source. His 
bearing, in his Logos state, with the antediluvians, has no 
such pertinency to the apostle's purpose, especially as the 
outcome of that forbearance was the destroying deluge. 
Here everything comes into line. The example is from the 
Christian's incarnate Lord; and the disobedience which 
feebly describes the rampant ungodliness that incurred and 
defied the preaching of Noah, is a term thoroughly appro- 
priate in reference to the rejection of a former preaching 
here, under extraordinary circumstances, renewed. 

I add that this hypothesis gives a satisfactory solution of 
the question why Peter made this reference to Noah and the 
flood. The reply commonly made is that it was done to in- 
troduce the ark as the symbol of baptism. But if Christ 
went and preached to the spirits who had disobeyed his 
preaching through Noah, and had perished in the flood, the 
difficulty is solved ; the figure of the ark would naturally 
suggest itself. 

But, granting that it is the risen and personal Christ who 
bears this saving message, what is its extent and limit ? First, 
the inclusion suggests the exclusion. It excludes the general 
world of ungodly men who had died before or since the flood. 
It embraces exclusively those who had rejected the preaching 



AN EXTKAOKDINARY JUDGMENT. 267 

of Noah, and perished from that rejection. Bat does it in- 
clude the entire body of these, or only a certain portion of 
them? What, in other words, is the extent of the term 
" spirits in prison " ? To this question I do not know that a 
certain answer can be given. Perhaps we can make an ap- 
proach to a solution. 

The predicative addition to the term " spirits in prison " 
sets them apart, so to speak, as a body closed in by them- 
selves ; limited to the contemporaries of Noah, and perhaps 
to a special class of these contemporaries. Who constitute 
this class we may not unplausibly conjecture. 

The deluge was an extraordinary judgment on mankind ; 
typical of the final judgment, but with important differences. 
It was a general, but not a universal, judgment; collective, 
and not individually discriminating ; fleshly, and not spiritual ; 
temporal, and not necessarily eternal. It was not a decision, 
ultimate and irretrievable, on the destinies of the race. While 
the majority — no doubt the large majority — were deeply cor- 
rupt, a not insignificant minority, we may hope, had escaped 
the contagion of the general ungodliness. The salvation of the 
ark was a family salvation, not discriminative of individual 
character. If one or two of the eight saved ones were un- 
worthy, multitudes, we may suppose, of those who perished, 
only shared the fate of their surroundings. Surely the prin- 
ciple of evil was not alone active in that awful physical and 
moral chaos. Many who disobeyed and took the consequences 
of their disobedience, yet did not go down as reprobates into 
Gehenna, but bore into some temporary prison-hold (yuAaxrjv) 
germs of goodness that were yet to receive the Redeemer's 
gracious visitation. They had disobeyed his preaching 
through Noah, in that long waiting-time of his mercy, but 



268 PREACHING TO THE SPIRITS IN PRISON. 

had borne beneath the flood, and to their subterranean prison- 
house, elements of life that were yet to quicken beneath a 
mightier voice. With what effect it reached them, — who- 
ever they were, — we are told with abundant explicitness in 
the following chapter: "For this cause the good news was 
published to the dead, that, though they had been judged ac- 
cording to men in the flesh, they might live according to God 
in the spirit " ; i. e., that, though overwhelmed with a tem- 
poral and earthly judgment (that of the deluge), they might 
be graciously granted a spiritual salvation. 

I do not in this indulge in mere speculation. The language, 
in the first place, restricts the Lord's preaching to the victims 
of the flood; the imprisoned spirits that had disobeyed in 
the days of Noah. Secondly, it allows regarding these, either 
of two hypotheses. It may confine itself to a section of these 
victims, who were known to Peter and to his readers as " the 
spirits in prison," and who therefore did not need any further 
defining limitation, and who did not require, e. g., the attribu- 
tive particle (who had formerly disobeyed him), but were 
understood without further description, as a special class 
of the guilty and unfortunate contemporaries of Noah. It 
certainly cannot be improbable that multitudes of those 
contemporaries in whose ears the divine message sounded, 
received the heavenly seed in soil that was not wholly insen- 
sible to spiritual influence, and perished in the flood, dis- 
obedient indeed, but not reprobate. These may fairly be 
conceived as the " spirits in prison " to whom the Lord bore 
his gracious message; who, perishing under extraordinary 
circumstances, were transformed from prisoners of wrath, to 
prisoners of hope, and shut up, not to the judgment, but to 
the mercy to come. Is it impossible that by some special 



AN EXCEPTIONAL EVENT. 269 

arrangement, such a gala day as this was awaiting the time 
of the consummated redemption ? 

And if the term "disobedient" overpasses even these 
bounds, and reaches all the victims of the flood, shall our 
orthodoxy meet an insuperable stumbling block ? Revert for 
a moment to the subjects, the author, and the occasion of the 
preaching. The deluge was an event so exceptional that 
God repented himself of it (humanly speaking), and hung 
his bow in the clouds in pledge that it should not be repeated. 
It stands the one sole type of the final judgment. The occa- 
sion was probably the most signal event in the history of the 
universe, the death and resurrection of the Son of God. Who 
can limit the form, or the sphere of action of the personal 
Jesus, just crucified for the sins of the world; just emerging 
from the dwelling place of the dead ; just having broken the 
prison bars of Hades, and the tyranny of the grave ? Is it 
incredible that he had some message of mercy for a peculiar 
age, which aftertimes were not to see repeated ? Perhaps be- 
fore he " ascended high above all heavens " he " descended " 
on some mighty mission, " into the lower parts of the earth," 
and if he did not visit all the reprobates of Gehenna, carried 
at least the 4< glad tidings" into some place of temporary dur- 
ance, and realized the promised " opening of the prison house, 
to them that were bound," in a much wider sense than we are 
wont to assign to it. 

On this point, indeed, I think there is no perhaps. But we 
may not, as interpreters, either deny or transcend the decla- 
ration of the text. Where it leads we reverently follow; 
where it pauses we acquiescently pause. The passage we are 
considering tells us nothing of the general destinies of the 
antediluvians, or postdiluvians. It fixes no certain limits to 



270 PEE ACHING TO THE SPIRITS IN PRISON. 

the desolations of the dreadful catastrophe to which it is re- 
stricted. But, with respect to that catastrophe, it throws into 
the blackness of its darkness an unmistakably relieving ray. 
It assures us that not all earth's myriads, except eight per- 
sons, and not all earth's unbelieving myriads were swept into 
irretrievable destruction. And it may be that the scope of 
its mercy is larger than our narrow conceptions. The bow of 
temporal promise which Jehovah flung across the clouds that 
had gathered over the retreating deluge, has shone across the 
ages in undimmed brightness and benignity. It may be that 
as the judgment which it illumined was typical of that more 
awful and final judgment, the bow itself was to be a token of a 
richer and heavenlier mercy. And assuredly the mission of di- 
vine benevolence which the passage that we have now been con- 
sidering records, was worthy in its amplitude and scope of the 
great Missionary who made it, and of that declaration of its 
purpose and results which is made in the passage that almost 
immediately follows, and which in my opinion, allows of but 
one interpretation : " For this purpose the glad tidings were pub- 
lished to the dead, in order that though they had been judged 
with a human and fleshly judgment, they might be saved 
with a divine and spiritual salvation." 



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